


«^^^ 



't«Mlr%|B' 






Class JPSSSQ^" 
GopyfightN°___J_2^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 




THE BIRCHES 



Flitting bird, blithe and free, 

Of nature's freedom the epitome, 

I catch thy spirit 'neath the bough 

That waits thy coming, and go blithe as thou. 

— Ruth Hazelton. 



THE SHADOW ON 
THE DIAL 

Intimations of the Great Survival 



By 

ORTON H. CARMICHAEL 




When that which drew from out the 
boundless deep 

Turns again home." — From " Crossing the Bar." 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



Copyright, 1915, by 
ORTON H. CARMICHAEL 



QEC -81915 

^CI,A416764 



<^ 




IN HUMBLE APPRECIATION 
OF THEIR 

KINDLY ENCOURAGEMENT 
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS 

DEDICATED 

TO 

SAMUEL M. RALSTON 

GOVERNOR 

OF 

INDIANA 

AND TO 

JENNIE CRAVEN RALSTON 

HIS GRACIOUS WIFE 
FIRM BELIEVERS IN THE GREAT- 
NESS AND BEAUTY BOTH OF THE 
LIFE THAT NOW IS AND OF THAT 
WHICH IS TO COME. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword 11 

I. Sunshine 13 

A Quiet Countryside 15 

A Rural Shrine 17 

A Little River 21 

Home, Sweet Home 23 

A Mystic Mirror 24 

Justice and Love 27 

An Only Daughter 29 

Kindred Spirits 33 

Wayside Sacraments 35 

The Robe of the Infinite 37 

Love and the Dial 41 

Jovrnal Entries 

Temples Not Made with Hands 44 

Extinguished Lamps 48 

II. Clouds 53 

An Eclipse at Noonday 55 

Gates Ajar 58 

Long Shadows 62 

A Morning's Needless Glow 64 

The Record of an Inner Struggle 68 

Journal Entries 

Ships That Passed in the Night 71 

Empty Triumphs 73 

Nirvana 77 

Closed Doors 78 

Tethered 81 

The Empty Vastness of the Night 84 

An Ominous Silence 88 

5 



6 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III. Clearing Skies 95 

Silken Cords 97 

The First Snow 99 

The Philosophy of the Grate 106 

Journal Entries 

Wisdom Older than the Schools 115 

A Blossom Above the Mold 119 

The Loom of Time 122 

Wild Wings 127 

Dreams in the Forum 132 

Visions that Disturb 139 

Voice of the Hills 144 

Christmas Eve 147 

Vanishing Illusions 151 

A Martyr's Birthday 154 

The Future that Now Is 157 

A Long Road 161 

The Lamp of Personality 164 

Easter's Message 166 

Rain upon the Roof 173 

A Bow of Earth and Sky 178 

The Ascending Path 181 

A Time-Mellowed Violin 185 

All's Well with the World 191 

Tuneless Strings 197 

The Sequel of the Years , 200 

A Shock of Corn in Its Season 203 

The Turn of the Tide 206 

Morning Breaks 208 

Rekindled Torches 210 

Life is the Light 212 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Birches Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Nature's Mirror 22 

Iris and Woodbine 26 

The Spring 30 

The Little River 38 

A Country Church 48 

Morning's Glow 66 

Ripples in Rhymes 72 

Still Waters 90 

The Catbird's Haunts 98 

November 102 

The Vespers of the Thrushes 130 

Winter Silence 148 

The Oatka 160 

Sunlight 178 

The River Road 186 

The Completed Circle 212 



NOTE 

For helpful suggestions in the preparation of 
this little volume the author desires to acknowl- 
edge his indebtedness to Miss Clara Van Nuys, 
a gifted teacher of literature; to Dr. Kirk Waldo 
Robbins, a brilliant student of life and a keen 
observer of men and events; to Grace Hazelton 
Vincent, a lover of nature, an artist, and now a 
sacred memory. 



FOREWORD 

Many a remote countryside, the blue of whose 
skies is never darkened by the black breath of 
the world's panting industries, and the quietness 
of whose winding woodland paths is never broken 
by the world's hurrying feet, is the stage where are 
enacted some of the most tender and some of the 
most tragic of life's dramas. Many a spiritual 
battle is fought out in the hearts of men and of 
women of whom the busy world takes little note, 
but the struggle may be none the less heroic or 
none the less significant than if the conflict were 
the object of the world's attention, and millions, 
with strained hearts and bated breath, followed 
the issue. And, often, to those who dwell in quiet 
and humble places, the great veil grows thin, the 
curtain parts, the mists lift from off the hills, and 
they share with prophet and with seer a moun- 
tain outlook, and share, too, with them a cloudless 
hope and certainty. 



I 

SUNSHINE 



A QUIET COUNTRYSIDE 

Elmwood, taking the word in its broadest usage, 
was a thickly settled valley whose irregular out- 
line closely corresponded to the outlines of a 
small township in one of the western counties of 
New York State. The valley varied in width 
from less than half a mile to three miles and over, 
and the long line of hills on either side sharply 
defined its limits, as well as separated its cen- 
tralized and its well developed community life 
from the great world outside. Using the word 
in a more restricted sense, Elmwood was a village, 
situated at the narrowest part of the valley, and 
was made up of a dozen or more neat and well 
kept but unpretentious homes, grouped about a 
four corners where stood a church, a schoolhouse, 
and a store. 

The broken nature of the country is such that 
the great trunk railway lines that cut from east 
to west this part of the State pass to the north 
and south of the valley, but not at such a distance 
but that on still summer nights one could hear 
the almost unbroken roar of the heavy trains, 
sounding not unlike distant thunder, as they car- 
ried the harvests of the West eastward to the 
sea. This distant roar, faint echo of the world's 
great bustling activity, did not so much break the 

15 



16 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

silence as emphasize it, and made, by contrast, 
more obvious the valley's quiet and peace. 

At some period of the past, however, mighty 
forces here had been at work; the ancient strata 
were tilted at various angles and the granite hills 
were in places split with seams from top to bot- 
tom. Nature, which ever tones down discordant 
tints and notes, that results may blend in general 
harmony, had, out of deference to the valley's 
present quietness, covered the scarred rocks with 
verdure, and the broken ledges, so suggestive of 
violent and lawless energy, were hidden with ferns 
and sumach and festooned vines. 

No one could be long in doubt as to the origin 
of the name which the valley bore if he stood on 
either of the ranges of hills that bordered the 
valley and looked across to where noble specimens 
of the American elm crowded the opposite slopes, 
or, on the upper levels, stood silhouetted in grace- 
ful lines against the sky. These noblest remnants 
of the primeval forest marked through the valley 
the river's winding course, and in the meadow 
pastures their great crowns of foliage threw dark, 
cool shadows where, during the hot days of sum- 
mer, the cattle stood munching their quids in 
contentment. They lined, too, either side of the 
roadways that crossed each other at right angles 
in the heart of the little village. In winter, their 
naked branches, like the vaulting ribs of a Gothic 
ruin, met midway above the snow-beaten road; 



SUNSHINE IT 

in summer, clothed in rich foliage, they formed 
an arch of green, and in autumn a shimmering 
arch of gold. Nothing could surpass the touch of 
mellow beauty which these trees, in October, gave 
the valley landscape, when their leaves had turned 
to rich yellow, blotched in places with crimson, 
and all bathed in the warm, soft light of a New 
York Indian summer. 

If the people of the valley ever reached a point 
where life could properly be spoken of as strenuous, 
it was in the store debates. In these mental 
duels blood grew hot and voices high and loud. 
The law of physics was reversed, for the more 
heat that was generated the less light was shed 
on the subjects under discussion. Sound was not 
infrequently substituted for logic, the debaters 
being only too prone to accept that common as- 
sumption of public speakers that the louder a 
declaration is made the more likely it is to be 
true. The long past in which our ancestors 
stormed the stronghold of their opponents with 
clubs and shouts, in a measure still dominates 
our methods as we attempt to capture the cita- 
dels of the mind. 

A RURAL SHRINE 

The house where the people of Elmwood wor- 
shiped was an unpretentious, but nevertheless 
beautiful structure. Modern church buildings, 
with their many wings and annexes providing 



18 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

room for parlors and kitchen and gymnasium, are, 
in their architecture, indices of the attempt of 
the modern spirit of religion to translate itself in 
terms of social service. The church at Elmwood, 
however, had none of these features, but stood 
in the midst of the valley as many of the old 
world cathedrals stand dominant in the midst of 
the towns where they are built. The tall, graceful 
spire was not only the church's crowning archi- 
tectural feature, but was also the symbol of its 
central message to the community, its taper- 
ing height directing the thoughts of men away 
from the earth, with its toil and defeat and 
tears, to the calm and peace of the blue serenity 
above. 

It had been built of material obtained from one 
of the limestone ledges in the immediate neigh- 
borhood, but the stone, now long exposed to the 
sunshine and the storm, had turned to brownish 
gray, softened when seen in certain lights by the 
delicate green of lichen growths. Ivy crept up 
over doorways and windows to the belfry tower 
where, across the openings, it hung in great, 
graceful festoons. The bell tones, filtering through 
this leafy screen, seemed to lose all their harsh- 
ness, reaching the utmost limits of the valley as 
deep and mellow notes of music. Some of the 
more aspiring vines climbed on precarious footing 
up the steep slate roof of the spire whose slender 
lines reached above the branches of the neighbor- 



SUNSHINE 19 

ing elms. In the autumn, when the ivy had 
turned to crimson, the church tower burned Hke 
a pillar of fire, visible for miles, as was the ancient 
symbol of God to the eyes of the Israelites. 

At the time of which we speak, the Rev. Silas 
Bonner had been, for fifty years, the pastor. 
Many of his ideas, like the fossil shells in the 
stone walls of the church where he preached, were 
suggestive not so much of the present as of 
epochs of life long ago ended. But, though feeble, 
he still twice each Sunday occupied the pulpit, 
exhausting himself and his audience more often 
than he did his subject. On bright spring morn- 
ings, when the scent of clover and the sweet, 
heavy fragrance of blossoming orchards was 
wafted through the church's open windows, 
interwoven with the languid notes of the oriole 
and the laughter of the little river as the water 
tumbled over the rocks, his sermons to the 
younger portion of the congregation seemed inter- 
minable. 

Yet the little church and its services had been 
in the valley as a beacon lamp whose light, shed 
over life's storm-swept waters, had saved many a 
voyager from some sunken reef, and had pointed 
the way from dangerous rocks to the safety of 
the open seas. In the cemetery were the graves 
of two Elmwood soldier boys whose tragic deaths 
were often rehearsed in these country homes. 
There was no Memorial Day when their sleeping 



20 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

places were not heaped high with flowers. It was 
on the afternoon of the second day at Gettysburg; 
they were lying in security behind the great 
boulders on the slopes of Little Round Top, 
awaiting the word of command that would send 
them in a charge across the Valley of Death to- 
ward the woods back of Devil's Den. While they 
waited they had written on the inside covers of 
the little Testaments which the Elmwood church 
always gave to its incoming members, messages 
of hope and cheer to friends at home. They ex- 
pressed the wish, should they fall in the approach- 
ing battle, that their bodies might be taken back 
to sleep in the cemetery in sight of the ivied tower 
where they had learned the lessons which now 
took from them the fear of death, and enabled 
them to see beyond the strife and bitterness of 
earth the peace and love of a sunlit land. When 
darkness that night settled down over the field 
of blood, and the thunder died out of the hot and 
stifling air, they were found by their surviving 
companions on the edge of the wheat field, by the 
woods, at a point that marked the most advanced 
position the regiment had reached, their quiet, 
peaceful faces turned upward to the stars. And 
many a heart had been nerved for noble effort 
in other, though silent, battles, and many a soul 
had been comforted in life's great defeats by the 
Sunday messages of the old church. 



SUNSHINE 21 

A LITTLE RIVER 

One of the physical features that held a large 
place in the Elmwood landscape, but not a larger 
place than it held in the hearts of the Elmwood 
people, was the Oatka Creek. It flowed through 
their thoughts and memories as it flowed through 
their orchards and meadows. The earliest set- 
tlers of the valley came from New England, and, 
being familiar with the broad waters of the Con- 
necticut and the Hudson, felt that this water- 
course should have no more pretentious name 
than creek, although many a smaller stream is 
called a river. 

The name Oatka is Indian in origin, and means 
"the place of pretty pictures." The water, freed 
from impurities by the limestone formations 
through which it flowed, was as clear as water 
from the mountains, and, when it lay in long 
smooth stretches, presented a perfect reflecting 
surface. The lily and the asters and the golden 
rod on the closer margin, the blue sky piled high 
with white fleecy clouds in summer, the varied 
colored foliage of the wooded banks, were all 
mirrored there till its depths were transfigured 
with a panorama of nature's colors. In autumn, 
when the maples were in their crimson glow, and 
the beeches were masses of gold, and the oaks had 
taken on their purple shades, and all were har- 
moniously blended in an atmosphere of melted 



2g THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

amethyst, the Oatka gave back to the beholder 
pictures, to find the equal of which one would 
search the art galleries of the world in vain. 
Many an Indian maiden of the lost past had 
doubtless braided her raven locks with no mir- 
ror but these waters, and in their depths had seen 
the color come to her dusky cheeks as she thought 
of some painted warrior for whom she waited, 
even as maidens of a later race had seen their 
paler faces blush crimson as in this crystal mirror 
they had found themselves so fair. 

Its course ran now close to the hills on one side 
of the valley, winding in and out with the lay of 
the land, only to meet some jutting ledge that 
diverted its current, sending it in a leisurely way 
between winding shores across the valley's level 
places to the range of hills on the opposite side. 
Doubtless in the long ago springtime of the world, 
it was a wild and madly turbulent river, racing 
from side to side of the valley like a furious beast 
behind the bars of its cage, seeking some opening 
to escape from its rocky barriers; now, as if re- 
pentant of an intemperate youth, it flowed softly 
in the sunshine, but yet, held by a past whose in- 
fluence could neither be forgotten nor broken away 
from, its current followed the old winding way. 

All summer it tumbled over rocks and rippled 
over ledges, breaking the silence of sunny hours 
with sounds that resembled nothing quite so much 
as the happy laughter of girlhood when it bubbles 




NATURE'S MIRROR 



SUNSHINE 23 

up out of hearts that have felt no shadows and 
known no stain. 

A mile below the little village, the river between 
its wooded banks swept in a great irregular arc 
about a carefully kept cemetery where Elmwood 
laid away its dead. Here the great elms on either 
bank flung their branches in graceful curves, meet- 
ing high above the stream, and the interlacing foli- 
age formed a green bower, grander than cathedral 
nave, through whose ever shimmering leaves the 
sunshine sifted, falling like a shower of gold on 
the dark surface of the river below. 

HOME, SWEET HOME 

It is a colossal egoism, but one not difllicult to 
understand, that reveals itself in the old theory of 
astronomy. The Earth was made the center 
around which the moon and sun and all the 
starry universe revolved. It was a similar ten- 
dency of thought that led the Roman ruler to set 
up the golden mile stone in the Forum as the 
proper geographical point from which to measure 
all terrestrial distances. Many an Elmwood boy, 
standing where the two roads crossed, and seeing 
the gravel ways running beneath the shadows of 
the elms toward the four cardinal points of the 
compass, concluded that Elmwood's four corners 
marked the spot where the highways from the 
world's four quarters met. This very natural 
conclusion was subconsciously strengthened by the 



24 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

fact that the horizon Hne, which swept the hills in 
a great circle, had the store as its center, and the 
tapering spire of the church, if extended in- 
definitely upward, would have pierced the sky 
dome at its very apex. Thus does nature, with 
subtile but pardonable deception, centralize each 
man's dwelling place and make "Home, Sweet 
Home" a universal song. 

This boyish impression of the cosmic signifi- 
cance of Elmwood was one, however, that lingered 
in many an Elmwood heart long after boyhood had 
ceased to exist, save as it lived forever fresh in 
memory. There was many a man, far advanced 
in years, who, in his lonesome and empty hours, 
longed for one more cool drink from the spring 
that ran from the heart of the Elmwood hills, 
even as David in his time of defeat and despair 
longed for a cup of water from childhood's well 
of Bethlehem by the gate; there was many a 
woman, bent and gray, romance and friends be- 
hind, who had her sacred hours when, like a nun 
with her rosary, she counted one by one childhood 
memories that seemed held together by the silver 
thread of a little winding river. 

A MYSTIC MIRROR 

The little river that wended its way through 
the valley imaged in its waters not only the 
goldenrod on its margin and the oak in its wooded 
shores, but in a mystic way mirrored the joy and 



SUNSHINE ^5 

the sorrow and the deeper Hf e of the people through 
whose fields and past whose homes it flowed. If it 
went singing on its way under clear skies that 
transfigured its depths with azure blue, it also 
went silent and dark where the hills flung their 
coldest and blackest shadows. If in summer it 
rippled to the kiss of every breeze, there were 
months in winter when its icy surface was un- 
responsive to the wind even when it became a 
tempest. The stream of human life that flowed 
through the valley like a river was flecked with 
sunshine and shadow, and had its responsive and 
unresponsive hours; if it eddied and lightly 
laughed on the shallow beaches, in its central 
current it ran silent and deep. 

Here, youth and maiden walked at evening 
along the woodland paths, and fair cheeks blushed 
as if to outdo the crimson of the sunset sky, and 
eyes danced and sparkled until, to a fond lover's 
gaze, they eclipsed the brightness of the stars. 

Here, too, the young and beloved wife, shad- 
owed by the wings of mystery and the Almighty, 
waited through sacred but anxious hours for the 
glimpse of a little sail beating in from mysterious 
shores across the foam, and sometimes in her 
dreams mistook the beating of her own heart 
for the patter of little expected feet. 

There is not a cliff nor a headland by the sea 
from whose elevation some one has not watched 
with streaming eyes the departing ship until its 



26 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

white sails are lost in the haze of the horizon's 
rim; there was not a home in this country side 
where heavy hearted groups had not watched, 
through days and nights of suspense and fear, 
as some loved head tossed on a feverish pillow, 
only in the end to lift anchor and sail away with 
sealed orders past earth's last guiding lamp until 
lost to mortal gaze in the mist and the mystery of 
the uncharted ocean. 

The cradle in the Elmwood valley was never 
empty and the cemetery on the river's bank was 
never full, so the shuttle flew back and forth with 
its threads of black and gold, weaving as the 
days went by the checkered fabric of life. Whether 
the joyous smile of greeting over the cradle or 
the last good-bye spoken above the casket lid 
masked the greater mystery, who can say? 

In this sunny valley, too, there were shadows 
darker than those which the marble shafts of the 
cemetery cast. Life can inflict wounds which 
remain unhealed long after those which death has 
made have ceased to hurt, even as life can rob us 
of friends whom death would have made ours 
forever. The mystic truth, too, remains that 
hearts that love are wounded for others' trans- 
gressions and bruised for others' sins; there were 
fathers and mothers here who envied their neigh- 
bors as they laid fresh flowers on the mounds 
where loved ones slept; theirs was the harder lot 
of mourning for the living. 



SUNSHINE n 

\ 

JUSTICE AND LOVE 

In the days when the Seneca Indians occupied 
the Genesee country, the chief of a tribe did not 
owe his position to the law of inheritance or to the 
ballot box, but to his superior gifts of mind or to 
his superior physical strength. He was chief be- 
cause he had proved himself capable of being a chief. 
The man who, when others hesitated, seized the 
infuriated bufiFalo by the horns and by one swift, 
powerful twist broke his neck, or who, in the per- 
sonal conflict, pinned his only rival to the ground, 
was the man whom all were willing to follow. 

Through the unconscious working of this law 
Squire Meldrum came to leadership in the Elm- 
wood community. He had never been elected to 
any position, but his soundness of judgment, his 
clear sense of justice, and the recognized integrity 
of his character had caused the residents of the 
valley to look to him when in perplexing circum- 
stances advice was needed, or when differences 
between neighbors required adjustment. He was 
the only representative of the law the valley had, 
and he dispensed justice not altogether according 
to legal precedent and tradition, but rather as 
did the judges of ancient times when they sat at 
the gate of the city. His rulings may not always 
have been legal, they were always just. 

Mr. Meldrum was of Scotch birth and at the 
age of fifteen had left his home in the Highlands 



28 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

to seek his fortune in the new world. By industry 
and good management he had accumulated a 
small fortune; small indeed, if measured by the 
standards of Wall street, but substantial and 
satisfactory as seen from the point of view of 
those among whom he dwelt. He lived on a farm 
about a quarter of a mile west of the Elmwood 
four corners. The house was of Colonial archi- 
tecture, standing in the midst of a grove of elms 
and maple and beech with a more immediate 
setting of flowering lilacs and snowballs and vine- 
draped walls. To the rear of the house, the 
orchard stretched on a gentle incline down to the 
banks of the little river. To the right was a 
wooded pasture where, in the shadows, the waters 
of the little river, like a ribbon of silver, wended 
their way between green grassy banks; to the left 
lay his level fertile acres. 

Mrs. Meldrum was of English ancestry and of 
New England birth. She was a woman of queenly 
type, possessing keenness of mind, fineness of 
spirit, and, in a preeminent degree, those qualities 
of heart that have made mother a sacred word in 
all languages. If any one had ever done her an 
injury, there was not even a gravestone in her 
memory to tell when and where it was buried out 
of thought; if in the past she had ever cherished 
an unkind feeling toward another, it was so long 
ago that all tell-tale traces of it had faded from 
her benignant face. 



SUNSHINE 29 

AN ONLY DAUGHTER 

There were two children in the Meldrum 
home. Frank, the older, was a robust youth 
who had inherited much of the physical strength 
and the mental poise of his father. Vera, the 
daughter, was a stately, beautiful, sunny-hearted 
girl of twenty or twenty-two; in features and 
build she was the image of her mother, but in her 
mental traits, while wholly free from silent mo- 
roseness, she exhibited much of the logical cast 
of thought so characteristic of her father and of 
the race to which he belonged. 

True to the traditions of a Scottish past, Mr. 
Meldrum had emphasized the place of the schools 
in his children's training, and Vera, as well as her 
brother, had enjoyed the privileges of New Eng- 
land college life. She was, however, fonder of 
music than she was of books, though a lover of 
both, and her mastery of the violin was something 
more than that of an amateur. 

But, preeminently. Vera was a lover of nature, 
a girl of the out-of-doors. In her earliest years 
she had read her fairy stories on the bank of the 
Httle river, and to her childish imagination the 
woodland was peopled with these airy, fantastic 
creatures. In those years she would not have 
been surprised to see troops of them dancing 
among the daisies or suddenly appearing in a 
golden barge, with silken banners and sails, 



30 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

around the bend of the river above. Here, too, 
in the wooded pasture she had read her Mother 
Goose, and the heroes and heroines of that child- 
hood classic had enacted their immortal deeds in 
the scenes around her. 

In later years many an afternoon she had spent 
out of doors, reading history or fiction, and the 
characters of the past and the characters of the 
imagination walked out of her pages and mingled 
in the shadows of the great trees. The wood-lot 
by the river became the meeting place of more 
splendid personages than ever assembled on any 
Field of the Cloth of Gold. The little river be- 
came the Nile, and floating on it was the golden 
and bannered barge of Cleopatra. Then it be- 
came the Rubicon, and Csesar is pausing on the 
farther shore. Then it is the river of Denmark, 
and on its smooth surface floats the white, sad 
face of Ophelia. Romeo and Juliet walked be- 
neath the great trees, too much absorbed in each 
other to notice her, and Evangeline, sad of face 
as of heart, sought still her lost lover. Chivalrous 
Arthur and his beautiful Guinevere were there, and 
gentle little Nell, and Hilda with her doves, and 
sweet Lorna Doone, whose face the years had not 
lined and whose spirit still was unembittered. 

According to a custom which had come down 
from New England, each member of the Meldrum 
family read a certain portion of Holy Writ on the 
Sabbath day. Since she was a child, Vera, on 




THE SPRING 



SUNSHINE 31 

summer Sundays, had gone down to the cool 
shade on the banks of the Httle river and read her 
stint of Scripture there. If some sound of the 
running water, and some bird song of the wood- 
land, and some fresh perfume of wild blossoms, 
or of the flowering dogwood, intermingled with 
the thought of the sacred volume as she read, 
they would have but heightened its meaning and 
significance to her. 

The stately elms were like the trees of the 
psalmist that flourished by the river of water, 
and the pastures around her were as green and 
the water of the little river was as still as were 
the water and the pastures that suggested to the 
Hebrew singer his songs of the peace of the soul. 
And when she read from the Gospels the record of 
the Galilean, she instinctively felt that the great 
out-of-doors, with its flower-decked fields below 
and its blue arching sky above, gave the proper 
setting for the story. While she read, the lilies, 
which neither toiled nor spun, idly nodded, standing 
so close to the river's edge that the smooth water 
threw back that beauty of white and gold which 
the gorgeous glory of Solomon's court did not 
know. The birds, that had neither storehouse nor 
barn, sang in the great elms above her, with no 
anxious note to mar the melody of their songs. 
Stretching down the valley was field beyond field 
of yellow wheat, standing out like patches of 
gold on a robe of green, now growing white for the 



32 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

harvest. The wind that blew where it Hsteth 
came fragrant, no one knew whence, stopping only 
long enough to toss her hair and mischievously 
turn an unread page of her book, as it went its 
way no one knew whither. Between the words of 
the parables as she read them, she heard the 
ripple of water on the river's gravelly shore as 
spellbound listeners, centuries ago, in the pauses 
of a wondrous speech, heard the waves laugh on 
the beach of old Tiberias. And, as she dreamed, 
the beauty and strength and purity of a great life 
were imaged in her spirit even as His tender but 
tired face was lovingly caught and held so often 
by the smooth waters of that ancient sea. 

One of the most common sights of summer was 
that of Vera sauntering along some woodland 
path, or else following the river's winding way, 
its crystal waters reflecting, in emphasized tones, 
her blue sailor suit with its sash of red tied loosely 
on her bosom, and a cap with white embroidered 
anchor setting jauntily on her wealth of raven hair. 
Sometimes she was seen, standing deep in blos- 
soming clover, listening to the love-song of the 
bobolink, her face lit up with animated interest 
and radiant beauty, and something of that fresh 
wonder that Breton gives to the face of the 
peasant girl in his "Song of the Lark." 

When seen in early spring on the edge of the 
woods, gathering the wake-robin which was red 
in the face from its exertion to be the first flower 



SUNSHINE 33 

above the snow to greet her, or when looking for 
violets which had raced with the bluebird to be 
the first to catch the welcome of her smile, she 
seemed part of the landscape, a cousin of the 
blossoms, a near relative of the birds. 

KINDRED SPIRITS 

A CLOSE and subtile bond of sympathy linked 
Vera Meldrum's life with the multitudinous bird- 
life which each spring was blown into the valley 
with the blossoms by a soft warm breeze from 
the south, and was blown out again by the first 
cold wind of autumn that blew the withered 
leaves away. 

Not infrequently in May and June, when the 
air was soft and warm. Vera was up before the 
eastern sky had caught the first faint flush of the 
morning. The day was rushing toward her over 
mountain and plain in its endless circuit of the 
globe, and she was waiting to catch the first waves 
of light as they beat in on the shores of darkness, 
and to hear them ripple softly on the beach of 
silence in the call and the warblings of innu- 
merable songsters. When the tender light of the 
dawn was touching with a miracle, like that of 
Cana's wedding, the river into wine, seated on a 
stump of a fallen tree, she listened as they wove 
for the young day a gauzy garment of melody 
made up of more tone-tints than Joseph's coat 
was of colors. 



34 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

As the orchestra leader follows the melody of 
each separate instrument, she divided thread by 
thread the tangled skein of woodland sound; 
now she picks out the "witchery, witchery" of the 
yellow throat singing in the clump of willow 
bushes at the far side of the pasture, now she fol- 
lows the goldfinch notes dropping down from the 
sky where he seems to be riding the swaying bil- 
lows of an invisible ocean whose wave crests 
break not into the spray but song; now she sepa- 
rates the bluebird's call, a sound too simple to 
analyze and too ethereal to describe, save to say 
that it possesses the suggestive power to carry us 
back over buried years more swiftly even than 
blue wings could go, to "the orchards and mead- 
ows and deep tangled wildwood" of childhood's 
cloudless days; now she listens to the little wren 
whose song is a veritable intermittent spring of 
vocal joy where the accumulated ecstasy bursts 
in such a torrent of hilarity that one fears lest 
the unrestrained force of his happiness should 
shatter into fragments his frail form. 

So for an hour she listens to the morning sym- 
phony; some notes flung at her by a self-confident 
singer near at hand, some reaching her from a 
distance like faint reminiscences of happy days, 
but she separates each from each, unraveling the 
robe of daybreak melody as one would the threads 
of silver and gold in the mantle of a king. 



SUNSHINE 35 

WAYSIDE SACEAMENTS 

The claim has been made that the silence and 
gloom so typical of the character of the American 
Indian are but reflections of the gloom and silence 
of forest and prairie, where he so long has dwelt; 
some have believed that the blue sky and the 
flower-decked plains of Italy, in some subtile un- 
explainable way, account for the beauty-loving 
and the music-loving traits in the soul of the 
Italian. The influence of mere physical sur- 
roundings in character building can easily be 
overestimated, yet, as a real factor in the prob- 
lem, it is not to be wholly neglected. It would 
not be possible to understand Vera Meldrum 
without taking into account the natural beauty 
of her valley home and of its influence on her 
spirit, which was as responsive to beauty as the 
still smooth stretches of the Oatka were respon- 
sive to the tints of the lilies that bloomed on its 
margin, or to the color of the sky that overarched 
its crystal depths. 

Beauty, indeed, clothed the valley as with a 
garment, and the changes which the successive 
seasons brought were but changes in the gar- 
ment's fashion. The ermine robe which winter 
threw over the naked shoulders of the hills was 
exchanged in April for a dress of fresh and dainty 
green, not surpassed in brilliant delicacy by the 
freshest of the April fields of England. The wood- 



36 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

land pastures and the long lanes dotted with the 
gold of innumerable dandelions, and the orchards 
in their bloom of pink and white stretching one 
beyond the other far down the valley, made a 
picture which instantly impressed even the most 
unobserving. In summer, the rich alluvial soil 
of which the floor of the valley was composed was 
covered with growing wheat and oats and corn, 
and these ripening acres rippled before the breeze 
into seas of emerald and gold; when the harvests 
had been gathered, save where the corn stood 
in shocks like the tents of an encamping army, 
the yellow fields still produced their harvests, but 
now harvests for the spirit, an aftermath for the 
soul, which was neither less abundant nor less 
essential than were the harvests for the body. 
As the season advanced the roadways became 
fringed with the bloom of goldenrod, and the 
fences and stone walls which divided field from 
field, and where the sumach and the ivy grew 
unhindered, now became scarlet seams on au- 
tumn's russet robe. The woodbine, climbing the 
lightning-shattered stub of some great oak, or 
billowing like a sea over the uneven ground, or 
breaking into crimson cascades over stumps and 
walls, at this season of the year added a touch of 
fire to the riotous commingling of color. In 
winter, in the frost etchings on window panes 
and stone walls, and in the delicate ice forms on 
the river, a triumph of workmanship was revealed 



SUNSHINE 37 

which made, in comparison, the bronze moldings 
on Ghiberti's doors seem crude and bungling, even 
though the great Angelo had declared them 
worthy to be the gates of Paradise. Thus beauty, 
in the Elmwood valley, changed with the shadow 
that crept slowly through the months across the 
face of the sundial, yet all seasons were its own; 
its harvest throughout the year was ever ripe, 
awaiting the sickle of any gleaner who had eyes 
to see it and a soul capable of understanding its 
meaning and its message. 

To Vera Meldrum the great out-of-doors, and 
no part of that out-of-doors more than the fields 
and hills and river of her own valley home, was 
a great temple, and the Gate Beautiful was the 
portal that opened for her the way to its Holy 
of Holies. 

THE ROBE OF THE INFINITE 

The evening hour in nature is a holy hour. 
The ancient record is that God walked in Eden 
in the cool of the day, and that the Master 
walked with his sorrowing disciples at the hour 
when the day was far spent and the night was 
at hand. 

In the summer twilight Vera, many a time, 
by the path through the orchard and across the 
green pastures, reached the old rail fence by the 
woods where, for an hour or more, she listened 
to the vespers of the thrushes. As if charmed by 



38 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

their own singing, they continued to fill the wood- 
land shades with mellow bell-like echoes until the 
red sunset sky faded into gray, and the twilight 
deepened into night. The tall timothy stems 
moved gently as if swayed by the passing of in- 
visible garments, and the low rustling of the 
leaves seemed as the whisper of an unseen 
presence. 

One Sunday evening in September she was 
walking along on the path that ran from her 
father's orchard along the little river to the 
church. The sky, save in the west, was cloudless, 
but it was dim with mellow light, and the horizon 
distances were misty with the smoky blue of a 
New York Indian summer. The hickory and the 
walnut trees had already shed their leaves and 
their naked branches gave a touch of melancholy 
to the scene; like the skeleton introduced at the 
Egyptian feast, they were a silent warning to the 
pride of the maple and the oak in their robes of 
scarlet and gold, that their glory, too, would 
pass away. Above the tinted woods the sky 
flamed in soft but brilliant splendor. The long, 
still reaches of the little river, too, caught in their 
waveless water the panorama of color, reminding 
one of John's vision of a sea mingled with fire. 
Great masses of cumulus clouds towered up like 
billowy Alps along the horizon, touched with 
gold and edged with flame. The thin, filmy 
strata formations higher up were stained with 




THE LITTLE RIVER 



SUNSHINE 39 

pink, fading away through a score of shades for 
which there are no names, to the green ohve and 
yellow of the zenith. The picture was one which, 
if at any moment it were transferred to canvas, 
would make famous the gallery walls upon which 
it hung and to its doors paths would be made 
from the ends of the earth. 

The religious atmosphere of the Meldrum home, 
as well as of the Elmwood church, was not free 
from the strictures of Puritan theology. The 
hardest task that Vera had met from her earliest 
years was to harmonize her mental impression of 
the God of the church with her mental impressions 
of the God whose finger print she discovered in 
every blossom, and whose robe was the colors of 
the sunsets. 

She recalled the Puritan, who out of a sense 
of duty excluded beauty from his life, and she 
rejoiced to think that every color that burned in 
a glorious New England landscape flamed in his 
face as a protest and a rebuke. If he in his zeal 
commanded his wife to take the gems from her 
finger and tore the bit of colored ribbon from the 
dress of his child, God, in autumn, painted with 
scarlet and gold the ivy on the church where he 
worshiped, and in winter blocked his path with 
snow jewels of a workmanship that no earthly 
lapidary could imitate. 

"Shall I," she said, "admire a Turner whose 
genius is revealed in the canvas of *The Fighting 



40 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

Temeraire,' and withhold all admiration from the 
Author whose soul shines through the tints and 
colors of to-night's glorious sunset? Shall I bow 
in homage to the spirit of Brunelleschi as it ex- 
pressed itself in the noble lines of the great Dome 
at Florence, and not bend in reverence to the 
Mighty Soul that builds the blue dome of day 
and frescoes it through the hours with such 
changing colors as the palettes of the Old Masters 
never held? Shall I let my heart pay tribute to 
the great and sorrowing spirit of Angelo, who in 
the mosaics of the cobalt blue of St. Peter's Dome 
set his own glory with the stars he placed there, 
and then withhold the uncoerced praise of my 
soul from Him who lifts the vault of night and 
there, in many a burning constellation, declares 
his glory?" 

There are times in our mental lives when a 
new idea flashes upon us and its coming is as the 
rising of a sun. A cherished dream may suddenly 
blossom into a fixed conviction, or a thought that 
we have long unconsciously held may suddenly 
become a conscious and priceless possession. This 
was such an hour to Vera Meldrum. 

As she walked on she lifted her face frankly to 
the stars, now beginning to show in the oncoming 
darkness, for all doubt was gone; she quickened 
her step, for she was fleeing from a mental past 
forever. Never before had the little church whose 
art windows were already brightening color spots 



SUNSHINE 41 

in the deepening night seemed to welcome her. 
The God of the painted hills, and of the sunset 
that spangled the sky, had become, in her thought, 
the God of the little vine-covered church. 

LOVE AND THE DIAL 

Henry Colvin, the only son of Elmwood's old 
physician, chose his father's profession. At the 
completion of his medical studies, the old doctor 
persuaded the boy to return to the valley and to 
take up, for a time at least, the practice which the 
older physician, after half a century of uninter- 
rupted service, was only too glad to lay down. 
Before many months, the skill, the open frankness, 
and, above all else, the genial personality of the 
young man had won for him, in the esteem of the 
valley, his father's honored place. 

Henry Colvin and Vera Meldrum had known 
each other from childhood, for they had grown up 
in the valley together. Neither could remember 
a time when they were not the best of friends. 
In summer after the picnics, and in autumn after 
the cornroasts, he was the one who always saw 
her safely to her father's door, and in the skating 
parties of winter, when crimson cheeks challenged 
the biting frosts and young hands and young 
hearts were warm, he was the one who tightened 
the loosened straps of Vera's skates and, in mo- 
ments of rest after vigorous exercise, his was the 



42 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

big coat that was always wrapped about her 
slender figure. 

A little later, when the college work of both 
began, they saw less and less of each other, though 
an occasional letter passed between them. In 
these years, when Henry Colvin was meeting for 
the first time the great world, a time to many 
fraught with danger, all women were, in his eyes, 
clothed with a sacredness not wholly their own. 
He never met a face in the throngs of a city street, 
whether the face was of one clothed in the soft 
garments of luxury and wealth, or the face of one 
in a worn and faded frock, but that he, in his 
thought, transferred to her something of the gentle 
modesty and girlish innocence which in the life of 
Vera Meldrum had so awakened his boyish rev- 
erence. 

This first winter which young Colvin spent at 
Elmwood was the first winter that Vera had spent 
at home since the beginning of her college course. 
She had accepted the position of teacher in one of 
the rooms of the Elmwood school. During the 
winter these young people frequently met at 
church and at social gatherings in the community; 
with the return of spring, and of the flowers and 
the birds, something of the old frank friendship 
of childhood came back. On Saturday afternoons 
he frequently accompanied her on long walks as 
she searched the meadows and the woods for 
violets and wake-robin, or in the pastures 



SUNSHINE 43 

along the river watched for the returning 
warblers. 

On the open green of the Meldrum lawn was a 
sundial which Vera had converted into a bird 
and flower calendar. On its metal face she had 
placed numerous dots, irregularly arranged, which 
to the uninitiated were meaningless hieroglyphics. 
They really represented, in a graphic way, some- 
thing of the relationship existing between the 
flight of a world through space and the flight of 
the tiniest of the feathered songsters through the 
summer air; they indicated how the position of 
the earth in its mighty orbit was revealed in the 
blooming of the violet or the rose. As the sun 
at the opening of the year, day by day, swept 
slowly upward through the southern sky, the 
shadow on the dial slowly shortened; as it grew 
shorter its apex touched successively, as it receded, 
the various dots which she had made upon the face. 
When in March it touched one of the outer mark- 
ings it revealed to her that it was time for the 
bluebird to return, and for the violets to bloom on 
the edge of the woods. When a little later the 
shortening shadow touched a dot of an inner circle, 
it indicated the time for the coming of the swal- 
lows and the dandelions. And, so on, through 
many markings to the inmost dot which the 
point of the shadow did not reach until mid-May, 
when the roses and the peonies opened and the 
bumming bird came back from far-away Brazil. 



44 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

One afternoon late in April, when the air was 
warm, and fragrant with many fresh odors, young 
Colvin and Vera stood together at the sundial at 
the twilight hour. Her face was illumined with 
the flush of health and youth and her eyes sparkled 
and laughed because of the mere joy of living. 
She was explaining to him the meaning of the 
markings on the dial. As he watched her slender 
finger move from point to point that told of the 
return of birds and flowers, wild joys winged their 
way through his spirit and fresh new blossoms 
bloomed in his thought, for to him the springtime 
of the heart's great romance had come. 

So, as the opening days of a New York summer 
grew more glorious with blossom and song: 

Love took up the glass of Time 
And turned it in his glowing hands; 

Every movement, lightly shaken, 
Ran itself in golden sands. 

TEMPLES NOT MADE WITH HANDS 

The valley community watched with interest 
and approval the growing friendship between 
the young physician and Vera Meldrum. Yet 
a shadow was upon the sunny path the lovers 
walked which the world neither saw nor sus- 
pected. It grew out of a matter of which neither 
had even spoken to the other, but of which both 
were only too conscious. Two entries in his 



SUNSHINE 45 

journal, written at this time, but not read until 
long afterward, shed the best light on the subject. 

Sunday Evening, March W. 

This morning I attended services at the old 
church. The sermon, as well as the whole intel- 
lectual atmosphere of the place, strongly reminds 
me of a half-forgotten, perhaps I had better say 
a wholly abandoned view point. 

The preacher's theology is characterized by 
finality. To him, evidently, the book of knowl- 
edge is closed. There are for him no continents 
lying beyond the seas of the unknown which some 
daring voyager may discover and, like the voy- 
agers of old, take possession of in the name of 
his king, which is truth. 

When the first settlers staked out their claims 
on the broad plains of the great west and ran a 
wire around their purchases, they may have felt 
the pride of ownership. They could have scarcely 
felt the pride of great possessions, for the boundary 
line of their acres on the wide-sweeping prairies 
must have emphasized what they had shut out 
rather than what they had shut in. To possess 
knowledge in any department of thought is a 
matter of satisfaction, but it can scarcely, in a 
balanced mind, foster pride as long as the great 
unknown stretches away endlessly on every hand. 

I shall not soon forget the last night of our 
vacation which a group of us spent in the Rockies. 



46 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

The sky was overcast and the air was keen, so 
that the fire that we built contributed, not only 
to the spirit of sociability, but to our comfort. 
But the fire that night did not conquer, it but 
revealed the darkness. The more pine branches 
we threw on the blazing heap, and the higher the 
roaring, crackling flames shot up, revealing the 
face of the cliflF in whose shelter we were camping, 
and the great trunks of the trees, and the inter- 
lacing branches above, the more it revealed and 
emphasized the encompassing darkness. The 
larger and the brighter our circle of light grew 
the blacker and the more fathomless did the en- 
compassing night become. The flickering torch of 
knowledge which man in his pride holds aloft 
does not illumine the world in which we live, it 
only reveals the all-engulfing mystery around us. 
The farther the geologist goes back as he turns 
the pages of rock where is written the story of the 
ages, the less clear do the chapters become; at 
last, a blotted record of hieroglyphics which he 
cannot translate leaves the beginning in mystery. 
The astronomer goes out and out into space only 
to learn, at his farthest point of advance, that he 
is skirting but the frontiers of truth whose fields 
stretch away into the unfathomed depths of space. 
The scientist may grasp the surface facts of mat- 
ter, and of force, and of life, but below that sur- 
face lie the unplumbed deeps that he cannot 
sound. The historian goes back across the cen- 



SUNSHINE 47 

turies, over the graveyards of a mighty past 
where sleep the teeming, scheming miUions who 
have Hved; with assurance he tells us the story of 
their battles and their intrigues and their trag- 
edies, but sooner or later he reaches that twilight- 
land of origins where he falters and all the trails 
fade out. It is as when a boy I followed the well- 
beaten paths that led into the woods where the 
cows or the sheep walked, but they grew less 
distinct as I proceeded, and finally vanished, 
leaving the tangled depths of the deep forest 
untraveled. The little isle of knowledge shelves 
off suddenly on every hand into water that is 
too deep to wade and too wide to swim. Truth is 
a continent in whose interior are forest-covered 
valleys and towering mountain ranges and broad 
rivers sweeping through wide plains, but we 
touch it only as Columbus touched the shores of 
the New World, coasting a little way along a 
small segment of its beach. 

Ignorance is more reverent than a boasted 
omniscience whose blazing noon dries up all the 
springs of emotion. God, whatever that term 
may mean, is infinitely greater than the being 
which has been shut up in the creeds, through 
whose grated windows we are invited to look. 
Life, with its love, and its beauty, and its mystery, 
and its wonder, is a revelation, and it reveals a 
Being who dwelleth not in temples made with 
hands. 



48 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

EXTINGUISHED LAMPS 

Sunday Evening, March 27. 

For the first time in years I attended to-night 
the young people's meeting at the church. To 
the eye the famihar surroundings remain as they 
were in the old days when on so many Sunday 
evenings I attended these youthful gatherings. 
The furniture of the room is the same as then, and 
the dark red carpet on the floor with its green 
diamond figures has lost nothing either in texture 
or in color. The photographs of the church's first 
pastors look down as of old from the wall, the 
years having neither mellowed the severity of 
their features nor brought any cheer to their 
patriarchal sadness. 

During the evening I could not but contrast 
the present with the past. While the hour, rich 
with a thousand associations, brought back again 
a multitude of the forgotten things of boyhood, it 
did not bring back to me boyhood's faith. The 
years since I left Elmwood have brought me some- 
thing, but they have also taken something away. 
But I presume this is the price we pay for growth. 

One of the most vivid recollections of childhood 
is of warm evenings of early summer, when the 
fire-flies flashed in the low meadow ground along 
the river. Even yet they dance in memory as 
danced the daffodils in Wordsworth's waking 
dreams. Sometimes to my childish fancy they 




A COUNTRY CHURCH 



SUNSHINE 49 

were diamonds in the raven hair of fairies, whose 
flashing lights guided their airy feet through the 
dizzy mazes of the midnight dance. Sometimes 
the meadow became as a firmament where winked 
and twinkled uncounted stars. I have crept many 
times along the hedge that ran down to the water's 
edge, going as far into the darkness as my childish 
courage would lead the way, trying to get a glimpse 
of their fantastic forms. 

One night I discovered that they were but in- 
sects with phosphorescence beneath their wings. 
The world since that hour has been a less romantic 
place. I had eaten of the tree of knowledge and 
was banished forever from my Eden. 

In the cold of winter the windows of my bed- 
room on many a morning presented to my awak- 
ened eyes tracings of frost work as beautiful as it 
was delicate. Here were mountains at whose base 
frozen rivers threaded their shining ways and on 
whose snow-covered slopes were forests of fir and 
pine. It was a fragile miracle of conception and of 
touch which no etcher's tool in the hand of a mas- 
ter could rival. How many times have I lain 
awake in the night, listening to catch the sound 
of Jack Frost at his work as he thus etched in 
silver a picture of his beloved Arctic home. 

When I learned that this frost work is but the 
form which moisture takes when frozen, I was 
perhaps wiser, but the world to me had lost 
something of its poetry. 



50 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

It was a little later that the deeper tragedy of 
the growing years overtook me. How happy with 
expectancy were the hours of Christmas Eve! 
How often have I lain awake resolved to hold 
sleep at bay until I could hear the sleigh bells of 
Santa Claus ring across the hills as he made his 
swift dash down the valley from home to home. 
But always before he came I had fallen into 
dreams. In the morning there was the rush to 
the fireplace to find that he had left the painted 
toys and books; but search as I would the snowy 
roads I never found that his light-footed reindeers 
had left there a print of their graceful hoofs. 

But one fateful night, when sleep delayed for 
a time his coming, and hearing a rustling of papers 
where the presents before had been left, I crept 
to the half open door. The gates of another of 
childhood's Edens that night went shut that made 
my return to the enjoyment of some of boyhood's 
keenest pleasures forever impossible. So, one by 
one, the dreams fade as the tender but glorious 
light and half-shadows of the morning turn into 
the bare glare of common day. 

To-night, as I sat in the little prayer meeting, 
I could not keep back the thought that more of 
the things which filled my early years with the 
touch of mystery and romance had gone; that if 
I had grown a little wiser the world had grown a 
little emptier. The lamps that my mother kindled 
in my life, and whose burning illumined childhood 



SUNSHINE 51 

with warm and mellow light, have flickered down 
into white ash. The veil of mystery that hung 
before many a sacred shrine has been rent in 
twain and the place is silent and empty. The 
blue sky by day which was the floor of Heaven 
and which was just above the tops of the tall 
elms on the hills, has dissolved into infinite dis- 
tance; the stars by night which were to me lamps, 
gleaming along celestial streets, have changed to 
fiery suns burning in the cold and silent depths of 
space. 

It is the touch of genius on the violin that 
makes the playing of the amateur seem so com- 
monplace; it is the masterpiece on the gallery 
wall that cheapens by comparison the work of a 
less gifted artist. It was the warm, full assurance 
and unshadowed confidence of Vera's words to- 
night that revealed to me just how much I had 
lost. 



II 

CLOUDS 



AN ECLIPSE AT NOONDAY 

It was mid-May. The orchards were in bloom 
and the wooded places were ringing with the 
mating songs of the birds. All was overarched by 
the tender, yielding blue of a cloudless sky. Vera 
had mounted her horse and was on the way to 
the woods where a picnic of her school children 
was to be held. She stopped at the store for a 
moment to purchase some articles for her lunch, 
but failing to attract the storekeeper's attention, 
was about to dismount, when Dr. Colvin, seeing 
her from his window, hastened to her assistance. 
The appearance which she presented photographed 
itself upon his memory to stay there always. She 
was clad in a neatly fitting riding habit of dark 
blue, which revealed the graceful outline of her 
slender figure; on her wealth of raven hair she 
wore a cap of the same blue shade, modestly 
trimmed with a cord of white and gold. A strand 
of loosened hair blew across her delicately molded 
face, now glowing with health and happiness, and 
a tip of a tiny shoe showed beyond the iron form 
of her saddle stirrup. Every move of her lithe 
figure, every gleam of her laughing, intelligent 
eyes, every shade of thought that flitted across her 
mobile features, seemed but to make clear that 

55 



66 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

the tabernacle of flesh was but a transpiarent 
medium through which shone an active, intense, 
and radiant spirit. 

He returned to his room and took up again the 
medical work which he was reading when inter- 
rupted, but concentration of thought now on this 
dry chapter of science was impossible. The specter 
of the inevitable man on horseback, ready to 
seize the scepter of a kingdom, has haunted and 
disturbed many a period of history, but the dis- 
turbing vision that obtruded itself between the 
doctor's eyes and the printed page was of a girl on 
horseback who had already taken possession of 
the kingdom of his heart. She was now riding 
not only over a country road, but riding riotously 
through his thought, and the rapid beating of his 
own heart seemed but the echo of her horse's hoofs 
on the distant gravel way. Attempt as he would 
to grasp the meaning of the page before him it 
always dissolved into a vision of a laughing face 
across which was blowing a strand of loosened 
hair. After staring for half an hour or more at 
the still unread chapter, he closed the volume and 
walked over to the open door. 

He had stood there but a moment taking in the 
fresh spring scene, when he caught the faint 
flying beats of the feet of a running horse; they 
grew nearer and louder until a foam-covered pony 
came into sight. The rider slackened his speed at 
the gate and called to Dr. Colvin that Vera 



CLOUDS 57 

Mel drum had been hurt. Without waiting for 
any further word of information, Colvin dashed 
to the barn where his own horse, quietly munching 
his hay, responded instantly to his rude haste, and 
at headlong speed they were off. 

The accident was the outcome of one of those 
unforeseen sets of circumstances of which life is so 
full and against which no human foresight can 
effectively guard. The day was to be spent with 
the children of her school in botanizing and bird 
hunting in the ravines and the deep woods of this 
rolling hill country, but the meeting place 
selected where the baskets were to be left was 
beneath a group of maples which stand just 
beyond where the tracks of the Lehigh Valley 
Railroad cross the Elm wood highway. Here the 
children had already gathered and were await- 
ing the young teacher's arrival. 

As Vera approached the place through the 
woods which line the road on either side she 
heard the distant whistle of an approaching train, 
rushing its laden Pullmans of sea-coast passengers 
into Buffalo and on beyond to the West. She 
rode on until she commanded a sight of the track, 
then stopped to watch the flying marvel pass. 
At this instant she noticed that two of the young- 
est girls of the school party had wandered up the 
railway in search of flowers, and now, frightened 
and bewildered, were attempting to reach their 
companions by running down the track in front 



58 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of the oncoming train; grasping the situation at a 
glance she sprang from her horse and ran to meet 
them. It was but a matter of seconds, for the 
great train came roaring on and swept past amid 
a deafening medley of unearthly noises, the fire 
flying from the rails where the reversed driving 
wheels were in vain trying to slacken the mo- 
mentum of this onrushing projectile of oak and 
steel. 

She had succeeded in pushing the two children 
to safety, but not quickly enough to escape her- 
self. Whether hit by the projecting beam of the 
engine's pilot, or whether thrown by the hurri- 
cane of rushing air, is not certain, but she was 
hurled with great force to one side, where she 
lay conscious, but helpless, in the bushes. Be- 
cause she suffered no pain, and even smiled in the 
old gracious way, led some to suppose that her 
injury was not serious. Dr. Colvin was not de- 
ceived, and when an older physician from the 
neighboring town, whom he had summoned, had 
arrived, his diagnosis but confirmed his gravest 
fears. 

GATES AJAR 

Vera, lay quietly on the sofa in the living room, 
where she had asked to be placed. The great 
hinged windows were thrown open and she looked 
out on the orchard and over the fresh meadows 
to the wood lot where the sparkling waters of the 
little river ran between its winding shores. The 



CLOUDS 59 

songs of the birds were everywhere, and the 
perfume-laden air was loud with the hum of 
innumerable bees. In the afternoon, as she lay 
looking at the great crimson clusters of rambler 
roses blooming by the window on the frames that 
she had arranged, a humming bird, back from his 
far-away winter home in the tropics, was balancing 
himself upon whirring wings as he passed hastily 
from rose to rose, sampling with fastidious taste 
the nectar of each. As she watched him in his 
graceful Sittings, the old sparkle of recognition 
beamed in her eyes and the old smile played 
across her features as she spoke of having seen, 
only a day or two before, that the shadow on the 
dial had reached the mark that foretold his arrival. 
She remained silent for a time, her eyes wander- 
ing from the roses to the green wooded hills and to 
the blue of the distant sky beyond them; then, 
rather to herself than to others, she quoted 
Bryant's exquisite stanza: 

He who, from zone to zone. 

Guides through the sky thy certain flight. 
In the long way that I must tread alone 

Will lead my steps aright. 

Vera gazed that last afternoon with a hungry 
longing look on the fresh, green landscape with 
which she had been so intimately associated 
through all her singularly happy childhood. After 
a long, wistful look at the familiar places she 
turned to her father with just the gleam of a 



60 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

troubled look in her eyes, to whom in all her 
growing years she had turned when problems 
pressed that she could not solve. Their eyes 
met in one quick, intelligent interchange of 
thought, in which each knew that the other un- 
derstood, and she said: "Father, will there be 
green hills, and blossoming orchards, and shady 
lanes, and little rivers in the Far Country?" For 
a moment he was silent, then he spoke: " Tn My 
Father's house are many mansions,' says the 
Evangel." The last word was the word that he 
had learned at his mother's knee in the cottage 
of the Scottish Highlands. So do we drop back in 
our supreme hours, not only to the faith, but to 
the language of childhood. "This fair earth is 
one room of his great house, and if he calls you, 
my child, to leave us, it is but to enter another 
room of his many-mansioned home." This silent 
man, in whose veins ran the blood of a silent 
people, had broken the reserve of a lifetime. 
After a pause he continued: "It is now many 
years ago, when but a child, my mother, who had 
been an invalid for years, called me to her one 
day at the gloaming when the great shadow of 
Ben Lomond was beginning to darken across the 
valley, and she told me that she was soon going 
to leave me, never to return. But she told me 
never to think of her as dwelling in a far, strange 
land; she was but going to a fairer Scotland. She 
was going where the red-breasted robin and the 



CLOUDS 61 

chaffinch would sing through all the year, and 
where the heather bloomed more beautifully than 
on the slopes of Nevis or Lomond. From that day 
to this I have thought of that Yonder Land as dif- 
fering from this, only as the blossom differs from 
the bud; and as the full brightness of these spring 
mornings differs from the misty, darkened twi- 
light that precedes them. John in his vision saw 
not a strange and unfamiliar city there; it was 
New Jerusalem; it was old, familiar Jerusalem 
made wondrously new. My lassie, the river will 
be there, but perhaps it will be a crystal river, and 
the fields and the blossoms will be there, but 
perhaps the fields will be greener and the blossoms 
fairer than the fading fields and bloom of earth." 

He was not now a theologian, but a father. 
This strong and tender man, who had ever met 
her needs as day by day she grew from childhood, 
did not fail her now. Slipping through his self- 
restraint burst one momentary cry, as the ocean 
in storm may throw one salty flying crest of 
spray over the rock barrier that holds it back, as 
he said: "But how empty will be the orchards 
and the fields to us when you are gone." In a 
moment he was master of himself again, but 
behind his stern external reserve of self-control 
the grief of a deep and tender nature broke as a 
sea breaks at night on a desolate, wintry coast. 

He arose and went out into the orchard, where 
the bees were humming in the blossoms and the 



62 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

air was heavy with odor, but it was to him not 
an orchard, but a garden. It was the Garden of 
Gethsemane, where he walked alone, and drank 
the cup to the bitter dregs. 

LONG SHADOWS 

She had been looking through the open win- 
dow at the sunset sky, now transfigured into a 
color panorama of far more exceeding glory than 
it is possible for words to describe. The smooth 
surface of the little river, too, caught the reflected 
splendor till it glowed like a sea of crystal mingled 
with fire. The billowing cloud forms that lay 
low along the horizon loomed up like domes of 
gold and amethyst and pearl, while at a higher 
level the cloud-heights lay like mountain ranges 
bathed in amber tints of subdued radiance, sug- 
gestive only of a light that was never seen on 
sea or sky. Turning to the little group of 
silent faces, she spoke to them in the old, easy 
confident way. "The one universal thing that I 
have found in these fields and woods and sky," 
she said, *'is beauty, and the deepest note in all 
the sounds of nature is in its songs of joy. In 
this home you have taught me, not by words, but 
by all the kindness you have heaped upon me, 
that the truest, sweetest thing is love. Beauty 
and joy and love have been the real, the per- 
manent things here; I know they will be the 
permanent things out yonder. Wherever the 



CLOUDS 63 

path leads, joy will be around me, and the beauty 
of the sky will still arch the way. A little while 
ago, a weak and helpless child, I came out of the 
great mystery behind us into this life, and Love 
met me with a mother's arms; now, I go out into 
the great mystery before us, and I know that 
Love, again, will meet me at the gate." 

As she paused, the tones from the ivied tower 
of the old church down the valley, announcing 
the mid-week prayer meeting, came trembling on 
the air, and their mellow notes seemed to start 
echoes of forgotten music in her memory. She 
listened until the last trembling vibrations died 
away into silence; when they ceased and stillness 
again fell upon the circle, she quoted from Tenny- 
son: 

"Twilight and evening bell. 
And after that the dark! 
May there be no sadness of farewell. 
When I embark." 

She started to quote the second verse, then 
paused; then she said in a whisper: "My Pilot — 
face to face." In the silence that followed, the 
light faded from her eyes as it faded from the 
landscape that her last longing vision had beheld, 
and the color went from her cheeks as gently as it 
went from the sky beyond the hills. A day in 
May, when every bud was reaching toward the 
blossom, and a young life reaching upward to 
hope's fulfillment, faded out together. 



64 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

For a long time the sore-stricken young physi- 
cian stood looking at the quiet face where a peace- 
ful smile still held the spirit's last transfiguring 
touch; at length, he went out into the deepening 
twilight and walked along the lane where the 
evening shadows stretched far down the now 
lonely path where they had so often walked to- 
gether. In thought he saw that companionless 
path run on across the years, and knew that the 
shadows reached so far down the future that he 
never could walk beyond them. At the foot of 
the orchard he sat down on the stile; one by one 
the stars came out above him, but he did not 
see them. Far overhead was the "cheep," "cheep" 
of birds of passage flying in the night to far 
northern homes, but he did not hear them. No 
message from this miracle of nature reached his 
thought. Philosophy at best is but a flickering 
torch held up in the night of mystery; now to 
Dr. Colvin it was but a smoking ember whose 
flame had been extinguished by a chill wind that 
blew in from a homeless and night-arched sea, into 
whose darkness a frail craft had sailed away. 

A MORNING'S NEEDLESS GLOW 

Slowly the morning broke over the valley as a 
morning breaks over a smooth sea where yester- 
day a white-sailed ship rode proudly on the water, 
but where now, on the black and peacefully sway- 
ing surface, a broken spar floats to mark the spot 



CLOUDS 65 

where the ship went down. Stricken hearts from 
the partial oblivion of a few merciful hours of 
troubled sleep awoke to a fresh sorrow, strength- 
ened a Kttle by their rest only to suffer the more 
acutely. 

The wider circles of the valley slowly realized 
for the first time, now that she was gone, her real 
worth to them. We never fully grasp the value 
of any of life's blessings until we get its true 
dimensions by measuring the empty place which 
its departure has left behind. Many of the 
splendid memorials in marble and bronze that 
adorn our cemeteries and parks are but belated 
forms of appreciation of individual worth which, 
while the person was here, has been too largely 
taken for granted. Vera Meldrum had grown up 
from childhood in the valley, and young and old 
had basked in the light of her happy, radiant 
personality as they had basked in the light of the 
day. But as the heavy hours slowly passed, many 
felt as if a star that had been shining in their sky 
had suddenly gone out; as if a spring at which 
they had daily been accustomed to drink had 
ceased to flow; or as if a song that had been un- 
consciously ringing in their lives had all at once 
died out into silence. 

And again the morning breaks over the Elm- 
wood valley where hearts are stunned and be- 
wildered, and as perfect a day was ushered in as 
a day in May can be. Under the tender blue of 



66 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

its sky and amid the flowers that crowded to the 
edge of every path and roadway, the customary 
funeral rites were mechanically carried out. As 
the company stood in the cemetery with uncov- 
ered heads and the last sad words of commitment 
were being said, the river murmured its sweet, 
contented lullaby as of old, and a brown thrush, 
on the topmost branch of a maple, sang as though 
its heart would burst for very joy. 

We are prone to accept the delusion that nature 
shares with us our moods of rapture and of grief; 
that its sky and fields brighten to furnish a fit 
setting for our happiness, and darken into gray 
and gloom to harmonize with our sorrow. Words- 
worth, depressed as he stands by his favorite 
spring, is sure that its water feels one sadness 
with himseK; and many of the older inhabitants 
of Illinois still will declare that the prairie lark 
did not sing on the western fields all that long 
summer after Lincoln died. But nature is wholly 
indifferent and oblivious of the changing tempers 
of our hearts. Our moods are the medium through 
which we see, and they color for us with their 
own tints the world at which we look. The sun- 
shine of our hearts becomes the sunshine that 
transfigures all the landscape before us, and our 
sadness gives to flower and stream and field a 
sadness not their own. 

The great painters are true to the facts of life 
when they picture the martyrs walking to their 




MORNING'S GLOW 



CLOUDS 67 

death amid the gorgeous play of nature's colors, 
and when they represent even the Christ stumbling 
on his way to Golgotha under a sky of undimmed 
brilliancy, and paint the sward about his cross 
dotted with the bright glow of lily and daisy. 
The Greeks, in filling the pediments of their 
temples with sculptured groups, crowded the fore- 
ground with writhing and struggling human figures 
in the contests and battles of life; but in the deep 
background the calm indifference of nature was 
seen in the sun's peaceful setting behind quiet, 
sleeping hills. 

And in the little valley where hearts ached even 
to the point of breaking, nature did not dim the 
lights of her festive hours nor silence the music 
of her springtime gladness. The robin sang his 
old sweet song as he swayed on the bending bough 
before her window, even though no young spirit 
was there to be gladdened by his music; the 
warblers flitted from limb to limb in the blossom- 
ing orchard even as they had done when their 
graceful forms and their Joseph-coats of many 
colors were imaged in two bright, glad eyes that 
loved them. The little river caught and held in 
its depths the imaged beauty of tree and flower 
that grew along the shore and was not less glad 
as it sparkled on its way, even though a familiar, 
laughing face was no longer mirrored there. 

Dr. Colvin saw with embittered spirit the sun- 
filled sky and the exultant fields in these days of 



68 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

his loss. It was to him the sardonic smile on the 
face of fate as it threw a young life away; as heed- 
less and as thoughtless as is the winter's wind 
that tosses autumn's withered leaves. The iron 
monster, rushing on in its blind course and hurling 
ruthlessly to one side her fair, frail form, came 
in his thought to be but the symbol of that fate 
that plays without plan or purpose with the 
destinies of men. 

THE RECORD OF AN INNER STRUGGLE 

The Big Trees of California in most cases live 
to be of great age. Many of those now standing 
are the oldest living things in the world, the 
period of their existence reaching back over thou- 
sands of years. While their shadows, through the 
centuries, moved in great circles on the m-ountain 
sides as the hands on the dial-plate of some time- 
piece of the gods, epochs of human history opened 
and closed, nations rose and fell. Some were 
young trees lifting their green tops to the skies 
when the Trojan war was fought and when the 
Israelites bent beneath the heavy burdens of the 
taskmasters of Egypt; they were in their prime 
when the cry, "It is finished," started an echo 
that will stay in the air forever; they stood as they 
stand now when the cowherd's wife scolded King 
Alfred for burning her cakes, and when the Gothic 
builders were lifting their first dizzy spires to 
the clouds. 



CLOUDS 69 

When one of these older trees is felled, the 
smooth top of the stump presents one of the old- 
est and one of the most accurate records of the 
past. In the process of their growth, as is the 
case in the life-history of every tree, a new ring 
of wood is added annually, the width of the ring 
being determined by the weather conditions that 
prevailed during the year. A wide ring or a nar- 
row one far back from the outer edge of the stump, 
tells of the abundance or of the scarcity of rain 
in some ancient summer, or of the heavy or of 
the light fall of snow in some long-forgotten 
winter. 

These giant trees, calm in their majesty, serene 
in their power, met with complacent front the 
vicissitudes of the centuries. They bent not 
before its storms nor yielded to its droughts; 
yet, at their hearts, they carried a secret record 
of the years' hard battles which were revealed 
only after they had fallen. 

Like the sequoia of the mountains. Dr. Colvin 
presented a calm and complacent front to the 
world; he met life with a smile as it came to him 
day by day. Yet behind an outward serenity he 
sounded the deeps of human experience. He had 
his spiritual battles, and if he knew something of 
the sunlit heights of victory, he also knew some- 
thing of the sunless gulfs of doubt. 

The human spirit in its hours of stress and 
conflict often finds relief in pouring its story into 



70 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

sympathetic ears; to a nature as deep and as re- 
served as was the nature of Dr. Colvin, any form 
of outward expression of the heart's battles more 
intimate in character than that furnished by the 
written page which no eye save his own was to 
see, would have been impossible. Beginning with 
his senior year in college, he had kept a journal, 
in which, with evident care and thought, he 
entered much of the inner story of his life. It 
was the record of his hopes and his fears as the 
battle lines of great conflicts swayed doubtfully 
across the plains of his heart; it was, too, the 
record of the rising of stars in his night that were 
to shine forever and of the dawning of hopes that 
were to know no setting. His most intimate 
friend did not know of the journal's existence; it 
was found only after he was gone. 

Dr. Colvin's problems were not the outcome, 
merely, of a philosophical temperament, they 
arose out of the experiences which day by day 
confronted a serious mind. They stole into his 
thought out of the shadows that fell across the 
homes of this quiet countryside, and that flung 
their black lengths across his own humble path. 
His inner conflicts were so closely associated 
with the outer life about him that the story in 
his journal intertwines with the story of the 
valley and its people. The winding river, the 
green fields, the summer rainbow, the autumn- 
tinted hills, furnish an inseparable background of 



CLOUDS 71 

his spirit's struggle as given in this record, as the 
golden stacks of grain, and the evening glow, and 
peasant homes in Millet's "Angelus" and "Glean- 
ers" are, in our thought, inseparably linked with 
the pathos and tragedy of his foreground figures. 

SHIPS THAT PASSED IN THE NIGHT 

Sunday Evening, May 30. 
I STOOD to-day by the graves of the valley's 
two soldier boys, our heroes, who fell on the high 
places of the field on the second bloody day at 
Gettysburg. They lie side by side and the spot 
was heaped high with many garlands. They died 
at twenty, and their early deaths are tragically 
suggestive of youthful dreams unfulfilled and 
youthful hopes unrealized. And yet, to fall 
asleep when all the impulses of the heart were 
high and generous and when their spirits were 
aflame with an enthusiasm of exalted devotion, 
was not altogether an unhappy fate. It were 
better thus than to live and see this white and 
holy ardor, expressing itself in a recklessness that 
refused to count the cost, die down into a cold 
and calculating spirit of a less valorous time. 
Were it not better thus to fall in the freshness of 
morning, when the dew is on all the fields of life, 
than to live on to see, as some of their so-called 
more fortunate companions have, the hot mid- 
day sun wither the young blossoms and turn the 
cool path into a dust-stifled way? 



72 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

Vera has gone, and her going is as a day closing 
at the first blushing of the dawn; it is as a song 
abruptly ending just as the first measures are 
beginning to swell into sweetest melody. 

Her death is obviously and cruelly untimely; 
but yet perhaps she had drunk the sweetest por- 
tion of life's cup and has been spared all its bitter 
dregs. She lived behind a shield that diverted 
every arrow that would have hurt or wounded, 
and all the ships of trouble went past in the night. 
No sorrow had lined her brow with a single furrow 
nor whitened a single strand of her raven hair. 
No heartache had robbed her step of its quick 
elasticity, and she went before a single cloud had 
flecked the blue of her sky or a shadow had dark- 
ened the sunshine of her way. 

She did not live to find her interest in life lose 
any of its keenness nor her buoyant joy in living 
lose any of its zest. She did not live to know 
from experience that friends can forget or to learn 
in pain that the love of those we love can grow 
cold; nor did she have to suffer what her heart 
would have keenly felt, the loss of confidence in 
bthers, or to know the sadness of having her belief 
in humanity shaken. For her, the spring time 
fullness of the stream of youth did not dwindle 
into the shallow current of midsummer years, nor 
had she walked so far down the way that poetry 
had turned to prose and the fresh tints of morning 
turned to the white light of common day. 




RIPPLES IN RHYMES 



CLOUDS 73 

In these dark days there comes a Httle gleam 
of comfort, a Httle surcease of pain, as I think of 
some burdens she will not have to carry, some 
heartaches she will not have to endure, some 
rough and flinty places in the road she will not 
have to walk, some mornings dark with storm 
that she will not have to face. 

Her years were happy years, and the memory 
of them in my thought is like flower-decked fields 
beneath the blue sky of June. What the future 
may bring or take away is uncertain, but this 
much of the past is forever mine. The years 
may rob me of health and of home and of hope, but 
they cannot take from me the memory of happy 
and stainless hours. It is a treasure that rust 
cannot corrupt nor thieves break through to 
steal. Into that Eden of recollection no serpent 
shall enter to leave a slimy trail, and at its portals 
no flaming sword will ever turn and flash to bar 
my entrance. This now is all that is left me, and 
it is little indeed, but all the gold that Croesus 
had would not buy it. 

EMPTY TRIUMPHS 

Sunday Evening, June 7, 
I HAVE gloried in the skill of the engineer as he 
has conquered mountain and sea, and in the vic- 
tories of science as it has snatched secrets from 
reluctant nature and pushed back on every hand 
the border lines of the realm of mystery. But in 



74 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

the presence of the unaccompHshed and the undis- 
covered, how futile and insipid all these boasted 
achievements seem! 

How petty the victory, even though the steel 
rails are carried over dizzy gorges and made to 
thread their perilous way through granite barriers, 
so long as they do not reach beyond rock and 
river and touch the border land of that region 
whither she has wandered! Why boast of the 
accuracy and dispatch of the mail system that 
brings but bills of lading to the shipper and stock 
quotations to the banker, but brings no carefully 
folded missive that tells of some new bird's arrival, 
or of some new blossom found, or of some kindly 
service planned or undertaken? What matters it, 
after all, if distance has been annihilated, so that 
we can catch a whisper from the marts of London, 
or hear in an Oriental tongue the price of rice or 
tea from far off Asia, if the wires never tremble 
with the happy laughter of a sunny heart, and 
never thrill with the vibrations of a silent but 
familiar voice? 

Columbus has been immortalized because he 
crossed a then uncharted sea and returned to tell 
an indifferent generation that beyond the western 
ocean lay a new world where a strange and savage 
people dwelt. But how empty the achievement 
seems when I think of that undiscovered con- 
tinent from whose shores no voyager has ever 
come back, even though millions watch the far 



CLOUDS 75 

misty horizon for a white gleam of one returning 
sail. 

I have admired the determined courage of those 
men who, beneath a tropical sky, pushed through 
the vine-tangled gloom of great forests and the 
poisoned atmosphere of serpent-haunted swamps 
until in triumph they stood upon the shores of 
that African lake whence the Nile takes its course. 
All the courage in me has been challenged as I 
have read the story of the Arctic heroes; my 
pulse has throbbed faster as in thought I have 
followed them while with pain they crossed the 
trackless waste until they stood in the white 
silence where the North Star was in their zenith 
and where their shadows moved through the 
hours in an even circle about them. But when I 
recall that the millions, moving like an endless 
caravan across the ages, have journeyed beyond 
the horizon into a country that is uncharted, 
how empty in comparison seems the gaining of 
the polar prize. How all but senseless have been 
the sacrifices made and the sufferings endured, 
for so hollow and so fruitless a result. 

They have, with infinite labor and patience, 
removed the sand that for centuries has been 
drifting over the ancient cities of Assyria and 
Egypt, in order to discover the type and details 
of life of those swarthy generations whose names 
and faces have for thousands of years been lost 
from human memory; but how trifling in com- 



76 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

parison is such information when I cannot know 
the conditions that make up, now, the life of her 
whose touch is still warm in my hand, and whose 
face was but yesterday lost to sight. What care 
I for the harps recovered from the ashes of Her- 
culaneum which the fingers of harlots thrummed; 
what interest have I in the metal mirrors from 
old Pompeii in whose polished surface some wanton 
decked her imaged locks for an unworthy and for- 
gotten conquest? Why should these things stir 
my interest when I know not what music reaches 
her listening ear to-night, or what silent lake 
to-day caught the mirrored grace of her face and 
form? 

Wherein is the triumph of mind in tracing the 
footprints of man back across the silent centuries 
until they are lost in myth and legend of pre- 
historic time, when I know not whither leads the 
path she took whose shapely shoe prints have not 
yet been obliterated from the soft, damp mold 
of the river path where last she walked? How 
meaningless is the claim of science, even though, 
as it scans the far horizon behind us, it can dimly 
discern the shambling figures of humanity, their 
faces not yet lifted to the sky, emerge from the 
outer circle of darkness into the first dim hazy 
circle of light, if I cannot move back a little the 
curtain of silence that but yesterday closed down 
behind her. And wherein is there cause for 
glory even if the mind on strong wings can cross 



CLOUDS 77 

a billion miles of space to charm a secret from 
some distant star, or trace the orbit of some 
dead world through the stillness of the unplumbed 
universe, if I cannot know where lies the path 
where she walks who but yesterday could have 
been traced across the meadow by the upspringing 
daisies which her feet had so lightly pressed? 

I care not how much light science may shed on 
a thousand of life's mysteries and problems; it is 
but vain so long as it throws no gleaming ray into 
that blackness into which this frail girl wandered. 

NIRVANA 

Sunday Evening, June I4, 
Life in the rosebush on the lawn abides from 
year to year; the roses which bloom upon its 
branches each June are but temporary manifes- 
tations of that life. The blossoms fade and 
wither and the thoughtless wind tosses the dried 
petals away; as another June comes the bloom 
will return only again to fade and die. The 
invisible life alone abides. The life of the race 
continues from generation to generation across 
the centuries, but the individuals of the race 
come and go like the leaves of summer. Vera 
was the fairest flower that bloomed in all the 
summers; but she faded as the flowers fade, and 
is it true that all that now abides of her is what 
abides in the mysterious force of humanity? 
Was her personality but a bubble on the surface 



78 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of the sea, catching in its filmy fragileness the 
iridescent tints of the summer's sky until we 
thought of her as a separate entity, but only, after 
all, a bubble that the winds broke and it sank 
again into the bosom of that waste of water from 
which it momentarily and vainly lifted itself? 
Was it but a ripple, catching from a new angle 
the sunlight that caused it so to glow that to our 
deluded eyes it assumed a form into itself; but 
only a ripple to sink back again into the current 
that runs forever? Was she but as a silver drop 
flung free from the crest of a breaking wave to 
gleam for a moment in the light like a liquid 
diamond, then to fall back and be swallowed up, 
all identity lost, in the swaying eternity of water? 
There was a time when to me this theory was 
as beautiful as it was plausible; but testing it 
now in the rough experience of life, it bends and 
breaks before the storm. To think of Vera as 
existing only as the snowflake exists in the ocean 
into which it falls, every mark of her radiant 
personality blotted out, is to grow hopeless in the 
measure that the thought seems possible. 

CLOSED DOORS 

Sunday Evening, June 21. 

As the vast and star -filled sky arches to-night 

the sleeping world, I sit in the unbroken silence 

and wonder where, in the great universe, Vera is. 

On what gravelly beach did the keel of her boat 



CLOUDS 79 

touch after its long voyage; and what landscape, 
to-day, stretched before her searching gaze; what 
mountain range swept along her new horizon? 
What flowers bloomed by her path in the morn- 
ing, and what bird song did she hear at evening? 
Does the Great Dipper swing up in the north 
in her sky to-night, and do the Pleiades gleam 
softly yonder in the south? Or has she so out- 
flown our night that other constellations flame in 
her sky? Has she passed to such strange and dis- 
tant realms of life that thither even imagination 
cannot wing its flight? 

Men have stood at the dark door through which 
loved ones have gone and have longed for the 
sound of returning footfalls, or for some whisper 
from out the mystery. But no message worthy of 
the beloved dead breaks through the silence that 
has engulfed them. 

The theory of evolution has familiarized us with 
the process of slow growth from stage to stage 
through imperceptible degrees of change. The 
things of to-day differ from the things of yester- 
day as the growing oak this week differs from itself 
of a week ago. But notwithstanding the broad 
working of this law, nature is full of sudden and 
startling changes where resultant forms bear no 
resemblance to their immediate antecedents. 

In the chemical laboratory, many substances 
pass instantly to forms so new that they shut all 
doors leading to the past, and seem to spurn a 



80 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

place for themselves on any ancestral tree. Clay 
changes to sapphire, and sand to opal, and soft 
opaque carbon becomes a transparent diamond as 
hard as adamant. 

The orbit of a comet may be an ellipse, and 
with the regularity of the hands of a clock the 
comet may return to the point of its departure. 
But let the merest fraction of force be added to its 
momentum, and the orbit is no longer an ellipse, 
but a parabola. The comet no longer moves in a 
circular path, returning again and again to its 
starting point, but speeds away along a diverging 
line never through all eternity to return. 

If a biologist from Mars, or some other world 
whose civilization is higher than any that we can 
boast of, but who was wholly unacquainted with 
earthly life, should examine the seed of a lily, does 
anyone suppose that he in this smooth oval could 
foresee the fragile bloom where filmy petals 
caught all the shadings of the sunset; or that he 
would be led even to suspect, as he examined the 
nightingale's egg, that the albuminous contents 
could change to a winged sprite, balancing itself 
in air, a quivering ecstasy of song? 

If the theory of Nirvana, a spirit losing its 
personality as it sinks back into the bosom of 
life from which temporarily it lifted itself, is far 
from satisfying, hardly more so is the thought 
that, even though the spirit persists, it is in such 
form as severs all the ties that bound it to the 



CLOUDS 81 

past. An ominous fear steals over my dimly 
awakened hope at the thought of a change which 
may have carried Vera out of all kinship with our 
present and fixed a great gulf between what she 
is and what once she was. Can it be that now 
she spurns the past even as the tinted blossom 
in the sunshine spurns the buried seed from 
which it sprang.? Has she left forever behind her 
earthly experience as a bird that is trying its 
wing in the blue has left behind the nest and the 
broken shell .^^ 

TETHERED 

Sunday Evening, July 26. 
The boy who has grown up in a remote moun- 
tain region, and who has never passed beyond 
the pine-covered hills that mark the horizon line 
of his lonely home, is lacking in the mental fur- 
nishings necessary to enable him to picture in his 
imagination the conditions and the features of a 
modern city. The limitations of his provincial 
life will lay their dwarfing touch upon every at- 
tempt he may make to represent in his thought 
the unseen. The mental image of the city which 
he builds must be constructed out of material 
which the quarry of his experience furnishes, no 
matter how poor that quarry may be. We can 
describe the unknown only in terms of the known. 
The imagination, in the end, like the crucible of 
the ancient alchemist, gives back to the patient 
worker only what he has put into it. 



82 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

In the little garden back of Shakespeare's cot- 
tage at old Stratford are growing all the flowers 
that bloom in beauty on his immortal pages; 
they are all native to the meadows and hedge- 
rows that border the Avon. This is characteristic 
of all the material out of which he wove the 
marvelous fabric of his creations. Whether he 
wrote of Shylock, using for a background the 
city of old Venice, or of Caesar or Hamlet, with a 
background of Rome or Holland, he wove the 
scenes out of material which the experience of 
his English lire had given him. 

Even creative genius cannot spurn the homely 
walks of common experience and lose itself in 
the glow of heights where all things are new. 

When men in any age have attempted to picture 
the conditions of a future existence, they have 
never succeeded in picturing them save in the 
forms which their own experience furnished. The 
Indian dreamed of a happy hunting ground on 
green meadows where game abounded and where, 
victorious in battle, he would hang multitudes of 
scalps on the pole of his wigwam. To the North- 
man, red-blooded and red-handed, it was a feast 
where the wine ran free and where the Hall of 
Valhalla steamed with the hot fumes of roasting 
game. 

The book of Revelation has exerted a wide in- 
fluence in forming general impressions of the char- 
acter of the future; but the chapters of this book 



CLOUDS 83 

are not so much victorious conquests of the unseen 
as they are the evidence of mental hmitations 
from which the writer nobly, but vainly, struggled 
to escape. This writer, too, constructed the un- 
known out of the known and builded celestial 
walls with material from earthly quarries. 

John but reflects the intellectual viewpoint of 
the times in which he lived when he pictures the 
splendor and the victory of the future under 
the form of a glorious city. The greatness of the 
ancient world, to a degree not true in modern 
times, was in its cities. The glory of Egypt was 
in Memphis, the glory of Assyria was in Babylon, 
the glory of Greece was in Athens, the greatness 
of the Roman empire was concentrated in the 
city of the Seven Hills. He was not only true to 
the intellectual viewpoint of his times in pictur- 
ing the future in the form of a city, but he also 
reflects the spirit of his age in representing that 
capital of love and peace and brotherhood with 
military walls and gates, which could only suggest 
the racial prejudice and hate of his own generation. 

Night to us is suggestive of delightful hours of 
rest and quietness and refreshment beneath bril- 
liant stars, but to the ancient it was the time of 
lurking danger in the form of prowling beast or 
still more savage men. The writer is but reflect- 
ing the thought of his times when he said, "There 
is no night there." He was an exile, and the 
stormy Mediterranean rolled in billows between 



84 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

his island-prison and the loved spots of home; 
something of his own personal wish, rather than 
any light touching the future, is revealed in the 
prophecy: "There shall be no more sea." The 
tenderest recorded words touching the great un- 
known were the words spoken by Jesus in the 
upper room; yet that description of the Father's 
many-mansioned home grew out of the deep 
needs of his followers who in that dark hour were 
facing a friendless and a homeless world. 

We paint the future in tints from off an earthly 
palette and build its fair walls out of material 
which our present furnishes. That fair world we 
see through an atmosphere of the present whose 
refraction determines the forms and the colors of 
all that we behold. 

The spirit at times sees its limitations as the 
prisoner sees the grated door of his prison cell. If 
Vera, to-night, is living, I cannot leap the grades 
of life and light to grasp, in thought, the condi- 
tions which for her make up existence. There 
are hours of wild unrest and helpless despair when 
I long for eagle-pinions to wing my way past all 
bounds of thought to find her and know her as 
she is. 

THE EMPTY VASTNESS OF THE NIGHT 
Sunday Evening, September 20, 
Elmwood is asleep. As I came along the road 
not a window showed a light and no sound broke 



CLOUDS 85 

the stillness, save the sound of my own steps and 
the rustling, as I passed, of the doves in the belfry 
of the church. 

When I returned late in the evening from a sick 
home up the valley, the air was clear and frosty 
and the night wondrously, even tragically, beau- 
tiful. The dew in the hollow places was frozen 
on the leaves, and they sparkled as if covered 
with powdered silver; the long, slender stems of 
bending weeds were turned in the moonlight to 
crystal. The river ran smooth and noiseless, its 
black current holding in its depths a myriad of 
stars. At first the valley was flooded with the 
light of the full moon, hanging low in the east, 
and as it dropped behind the woods, the arching 
branches of the great elms were silhouetted against 
a background of gold. When it disappeared below 
the horizon the stars multiplied in number and 
burned with a clearer brightness until the river 
below, with a borrowed glory, vied with the sky 
above in brilliancy. The silence of the night 
which throbbed in its oppressiveness was not 
broken but revealed by the barking of a dog in the 
distance or the call of an unknown bird in the 
trees across the meadow. The stillness seemed to 
reach upward and to wrap the stars in its hush. 

It is a night that bows the mind down before 
the mystery, and scares the heart with the vast- 
ness and indifference of the universe. It is a night 
like that which chilled with dark despair the spirit 



86 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of Carlyle when in the great city around him 
burned a milhon Hghts in windows where pain and 
sickness and hunger tossed on sleepless pillows 
and, above, burned the glittering stars in calm 
and cruel unconcern. 

Heaven at one time was not so far away but 
that man, as in Jacob's dream, could lift a ladder 
and its top would reach it; not so far but that the 
heroes by piling mountain on mountain could 
scale it. The ancient dwellers on the Plains of 
Shinar hoped by their mighty tower to take 
heaven by force. But the great telescopes with 
lenses multiplying many times the seeing power of 
the eye do not reveal a gleam of any many-gated 
city looming dimly in the far distance. The 
keenest eye behind the most powerful glass has 
never discerned the faintest outline of far-lying 
ranges of cool, evergreen mountains, and the 
sharpest ears, in the stillness of those midnight 
watchtowers, never catch the echo of low, sweet 
melody dropping down from celestial choirs. The 
sensitive photographic plate, exposed all night to 
the mystery of the star depths, may in the morn- 
ing hold the images of suns a billion miles away, 
but it will show no line of distant domes or mina- 
rets or gleam of crystal lake or illumined city. 

A trembling ray of light, a thousand years in 
coming, reaches us across the mighty vastness 
from some distant sun; a thousand light years 
beyond that another sun burns in its loneliness; 



CLOUDS 87 

and deeper still in the unplumbed depths is 
another sun so distant that the imagination, like 
the wings of Noah's dove, grows weary and returns 
upon itself to find rest. Across this boundless 
space, as snowflakes drifting over frozen fields 
before the winter's wind, our own world is wildly 
flying, and no one knows whither. 

Even if Vera to-night still lives, how can I hope 
ever again in this great vastness to meet her? If 
two snowflakes resting together on the white sum- 
mit of the Jungfrau should be picked up by the 
brainless wind and whirled apart, one to drop in 
the rocky valley at Lauterbrunnen, northward, 
the other to be swept across the B ernes Alps to 
the valley of Lotschen on the south, would they 
ever, by the play of blind forces, again be brought 
together .f^ One would melt and find its way 
through Lake Thun to the Rhine and at last 
would reach the cold waters of the North Sea; 
the other would go into the Rhone and after 
many wild and winding ways would lose itself in 
the blue waters of the Mediterranean. And yet 
the chances that these two drops of water would 
again meet and run on together in some laughing 
brook, or as two snowflakes would fall together 
out of some eddying storm on the same peak, are 
as a million to one as compared with the chance 
that our paths in this awful vastness ever again 
will cross. 

The squirrel snugly curled up in the hollow hmb 



88 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of the oak is sheltered from the November chill; 
the mouse in his burrow in the meadow, and the 
winter bird on the leeward side of tree or boulder, 
is protected from the night's cold air. In security 
they sleep peacefully beneath the stars. But to- 
night my spirit knows no home. Like a traveler 
in the Arctic snows whose shelter tent the storm 
has carried away, I am exposed to the bitter wind 
that blows cold from the edges of the homeless 
universe. 

That little grave beneath the maples, close to 
the path where human feet daily pass, and where 
the wild birds sing and where the warm sun in 
spring brings back the blossoms, seems to-night 
a cosy spot even though it holds but dreamless 
dust. Better thus, than to think of her gentle 
spirit passing out through the dark portal where 
no lamp burns into the vast and homeless spaces 
where dead worlds sweep on into ever deeper 
darkness and wild, untamed forces whirl and 
eddy in cyclones of fire. 

AN OMINOUS SILENCE 

Sunday Evening, September 27. 
This afternoon I followed my heart and the 
river's winding path and they took me to the 
cemetery. The hush of an autumn evening was 
upon the woods. The leaves on the topmost 
branches of the maples, as if fanned by invisible 
wings, rippled into motion, but not into sound. 



CLOUDS 89 

Thin gossamer strands of spider's thread, as vague 
and unsubstantial as philosophic theories thrown 
out into the mystery of the unknown, trailed off 
from fence post and mullein stalk, seeking in space 
some unseen point of attachment. A butterfly 
on the gravel roadway opened and closed his 
painted wings in the genial warmth of the sun's 
low slanting rays. A pewee perched on the dead 
limbs of a nearby beech gave now and then his 
melancholy call, and far away in the wood a 
squirrel occasionally chirred and chattered. 

How oppressive must be the silence of a Polar 
midnight. In that white desolation no drone of 
buzzing wings, no chirp of insect, no call of bird 
is heard. Not even a hemlock or a pine is there 
to catch the moan of the cold wind's sadness. 

How deep must be the silence of the forsaken 
ruin of the desert where no whisper is ever heard 
save that of the night wind; where bats cling to 
walls that once echoed with laughter and song; 
where the lion creeps as silent as his own shadow 
through broken doorways where guests were once 
noisily welcomed, and where, in the sun, the snake 
basks undisturbed on floors over which youth and 
maiden once lightly tripped. 

How awful must be the silence on the surface 
of yonder moon, now so full and clear, hanging in 
this cloudless September night. Nothing even 
remotely suggests life unless it be the black 
shadows of the splintered cliffs which slowly and 



90 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

noiselessly move through the day over chasm and 
crater like the traditional finger of fate. No 
cushioned tread of skulking beast is ever heard in 
those deep ravines, and no hungry cry is ever 
echoed back from those canyons' walls. No rus- 
tling of green leaves, no stream rippling over stony 
beds, no streamlets trickling down the cliffs or 
dripping from overhanging rock ever break, night 
or day, the silence. 

But no other silence, either of experience or of 
the imagination, is to be compared to the silence 
that hushes at last the orator's persuasive words, 
the sweet singer's song, the youth's happy laugh- 
ter, and the infant's cry; all silence is vocal as 
compared with the silence of the grave. If but 
one word would break from the stillness that has 
engulfed her! If but a whisper would reach me 
from the silence into which she wandered, to tell 
me that still, somewhere, she is! To-day, I stood 
by the mound in the cemetery where the grass is 
already starting to grow, as if nature would blot 
out the last distinctive mark that speaks of her, 
and standing there I called aloud her name. 
There was no reply, save the mocking echoes of 
my own voice. The squirrel chattered in the 
woods and the brainless sound was like the cruel 
laughter of death as he exulted in his perfect 
triumph. The maddening silence was black with 
suggestion of grave's victory. 

The college boy remembers through all after 




STILL WATERS 



CLOUDS 91 

years the old campus and hall where he was 
happy in the friendships of a generous youth; and 
however crowded those after years may be with 
unfinished tasks, at times he returns to walk and 
muse again in the old loved places. The young 
girl may grow to womanhood and in regions far 
removed may be happy in new interests and new 
circles, yet, now and again, does she return to the 
old home to live over again in familiar places the 
old dreams and the old romances of a happy past. 
But there is nothing trustworthy in our common 
experience to justify the belief that our dead, no 
matter what the ties that bound them to places 
or to beloved circles, ever open the gates that lead 
out from the great silence that has fallen upon 
them to visit again the old scenes. 

How Shakespeare loved the green fields and 
hills of England; but there is no evidence fur- 
nished to the senses that he ever emerged from 
the mighty silence to see again the hawthorne 
blooming by the Avon, or to visit again the place 
where the wild thyme grows. Wordsworth pas- 
sionately loved the mountains and the lakes of 
his Cumberland home, but who is willing to say 
that he ever returned to listen at evening to the 
cuckoo's old sweet call, or to see again the daffo- 
dils dance by the water's edge in glee? There 
is none to tell us that the curtain of silence that 
fell between us and the mighty spirit of Lincoln 
on that dark and rain-drenched morning of the 



92 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

sixties, has ever been parted by his gentle hands as 
he returned to catch a ghmpse of the scene in which 
he played so great a part, or to inquire as to the 
outcome of that battle in which his heart was so 
wholly enlisted. 

For generations the dwellers in this valley have 
been passing through the door of mystery to the 
great silence. Whatever our wishes or our philos- 
ophy may be, there is nothing convincing in our 
experience to lead us to believe that even one of 
them ever returned. The leaves have come again 
each year to the maple and the elm, and the birds 
from their southern homes return to sing and to 
build again in the old places; but not once has the 
silence that hangs over these graves beneath the 
maples been broken by the return of a father to 
walk again over his beloved acres, or by the re- 
turn of a mother to the nursery to hold in her 
arms again the helpless babe which once was 
dearer to her than life. No lover has come back 
to walk again in the moonlit path where he knew 
the first thrill of the heart's great passion; no 
child has wandered out of that realm of stillness 
to gather up the scattered and neglected toys. 

How Vera loved these woodland places where 
every blossom was a friendly face, and how she 
loved the river and the orchard where every bird 
was known and named. But the silence of that 
May twilight that stilled that radiant spirit and 
sealed her lips has grown more deep and awful 



CLOUDS 93 

with dread significance through the passing days. 
The robin has called in the morning, and the sun- 
set hours have painted as of old the sky canvas 
with the glory of crimson and gold, and I have 
waited by the old paths, but there has been no 
rustle of passing garments, no sound of returning 
footsteps. 

At the door of this appalling silence I stand and 
call and there comes back no reply save the mock- 
ing echo of my own voice; I knock at the iron 
gate, and it gives back only a hollow and empty 
sound. The stillness but reveals that the house of 
death is tenantless. Ears of dust are not disturbed 
by our calling and hearts of ashes do not thrill re- 
sponsive to our desire. Hands that have turned 
to clay cannot reach up to unbar the gate. The 
lamp has gone out and the silence is that of an 
eternal sleep. 



m 

CLEARING SKIES 



SILKEN CORDS 

The Avon flowing through English fields makes 
a picture surpassingly fresh and beautiful, but 
the element of interest that draws thousands to 
that country scene is the fact that Shakespeare 
once walked along its winding shores, and trans- 
planted to his pages the flowers that bloomed on 
its banks, and made immortal the passing scenes 
of comedy and tragedy, of love and death, which 
he saw in the humble homes about him. The 
shadows of the Forest of Arden are cooler and the 
bank where the wild thyme grows is greener be- 
cause we have felt and seen them in his songs. 
The Jordan flows not so much through the flat, 
sunbaked valleys of Palestine as it sparkles and 
ripples through the thoughts and feelings of man- 
kind. How many a home among the hills or on 
the plain, how many a path that runs on the edge 
of the woods, how many a maple-shaded dell is 
beautiful in some heart with a beauty that is not 
wholly its own. 

There was not a path that ran in the cool and 
shaded places of the Elmwood valley that Dr. 
Colvin could walk entirely alone, for every bend 
and nook was thronged with the memories of a 
happy past. There was not a bird song in all these 

97 



98 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

wooded hills that did not, to his ear, borrow a 
melody and a sweetness from the voice of her who 
here had praised it; nor did a flower bloom in all 
the meadows that did not borrow some light from 
the eyes, some glow from the cheeks of her who 
here had in admiration so often bent above it. He 
never heard the vesper symphony of the thrushes 
that he did not see a charmed and listening face, 
and the bobolink never sang his rollicking song 
above the clover fields of summer that in it he 
did not catch the far echo of the laughter of a 
happy girl. He never saw the Meldrum orchard 
that he did not catch the odor of blossoms that 
long ago had withered, and hear the low sweet 
tones of a violin over whose trembling strings 
leaned a wrapt and dreaming face. He never 
saw the little river still with light like a soul 
God's presence fills, that it did not suggest the 
crystalline sincerity of her spirit. Morning, fra- 
grant with new blossoms, never opened that it 
did not seem pure with her love, and night never 
darkened down over the hills that her presence 
did not seem to breathe around him. He could 
have made the poet's words his own: 

Thy voice is on the rolling air; 
I hear thee where the waters run. 
Thou standest in the rising sun. 

And in the setting thou art fair. 

So the silken threads, so hard for him to break, 
which a coarser or a weaker nature might have 




THE CATBIRD'S HAUNTS 



CLEARING SKIES 99 

ignored or perhaps not have felt, bound him to 
these famiHar places. He postponed from week 
to week his intended departure, and at last let 
all plans for leaving the valley slip wholly from 
his thought. 

THE FIRST SNOW 

The season's panorama of colors, from the 
green of June that decked forests and field to the 
glory of autumn that touched the sumach and 
maples with crimson and gold, had blazed before 
Dr. Colvin's eyes unseen. The birds had sung 
their summer songs and he had not heard them. 
Since that black hour in May, he had lived in an 
inner world of feeling rather than in an outer 
world of sight and sound. 

This morning he had been called before dawn 
to a home up the valley where all day he had 
matched his knowledge and skill against death, 
where the stake was the life of a little child. But 
play as he would he found himself checkmated 
at every point, and as the day wore slowly away 
he realized that he had lost. As the first twilight 
shadows began to deepen, life ebbed out with the 
light, and the little patient fell asleep. 

The stricken cry of a mother's unfathomed sor- 
row, the cry of Rachel for her children because 
they were not, smote heavy on his heart. The 
Httle pet of the household, whose reluctant feet 
had hesitated on the threshold of every darkened 



100 THE SPIADOW ON THE DIAL 

room, and who feared, unattended, to climb the 
unlighted stairs, had now gone out into the great 
night of the unknown, and had gone alone. A 
little, frail skiff had drifted beyond human reach 
on the infinite tide. 

The mother, with a strong and conscious effort 
of the will, pushed back the grim primitive fear 
as she clung to the hope and the vision which her 
religion gave. She told the little sisters whose 
scared faces looked to her for light that little 
Helen had entered the city where there was neither 
sickness nor night, and where on golden streets of 
light her baby feet would never stumble or grow 
weary. 

The young doctor was reminded that a starv- 
ing man in his last delirium dreams of tables 
laden with fruit and wine, and the traveler dying 
of thirst in the desert sees visions of sparkling 
fountains and hears the laughter of mountain 
streams. Perhaps it is a kindness, he thinks, on 
the part of nature, as if repentant at last of her 
own heartlessness, to add deception to her cruelty 
and thus with delusions to give narcotic ease to 
the aches and pains which her blows inflict. 
Perhaps it is well, he thinks, that a crushed heart 
gives birth to a hope which acts as its own balm, 
and that the hot wastes of grief give rise to mirages 
which, though earth-born, glow on the sky of love. 

Dr. Colvin lingered a little while to speak, not 
simply the words which custom dictated, but the 



CLEARING SKIES 101 

generous words of human interest which his heart 
prompted; yet he felt how useless were any spoken 
words, least of all any words that he might speak, 
to relieve even by the weight of a straw the sense 
of mystery and loss. He was soon in his carriage 
on his homeward drive, his face deep buried in the 
collar of his fur coat, and the sense of life's tragedy 
and mystery fresh and heavy upon him. 

He could not keep down in his thought the grim 
sense of irony that the echoes of a little voice 
should linger always in a fond heart and the voice 
itself be silent forever; that little shoes should be 
treasured up as priceless keepsakes while the little 
feet whose impress they bear had gone back to 
original dust. Why should the picture of a little 
face, more beautiful than the child faces that 
Reynolds painted, more precious than the cherub 
faces that Raphael put in his Sistine canvas, re- 
main on the walls of memory, while the face itseK 
had crumbled back to white ashes. Thus the cur- 
rent of his thought swept on like the winter current 
of the little river along which he rode whose dark 
depths caught no glint of sunshine, no gleam of 
the sky's hidden blue. His face was scarcely 
lifted from the collar of his great coat as the miles 
of country road were left behind, and the hush 
of tne twilight was unbroken save by the muffled 
beat of the horse's hoofs on the snow and the 
crunching sound of breaking ice as now and then 
the wheels cut through the frozen road. 



102 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

At length he rounded a curve, bringing him 
into the open woodland which at this point skirted, 
on either side, both river and road. It formed a 
part of the Meldrum farm and every bush and 
tree was associated in his thoughts with Vera. 
He reined in his horse to a walk, as he had always 
done here, as if he still feared that he might 
frighten away some bird that she was watching 
or end abruptly by his intrusion some warbler's 
song to which she was listening. Unconsciously 
his eyes searched the woods on either side as if 
he hoped to catch a glimpse of a familiar form 
and face. 

Like a bow long bent, his mind, under the magic 
touch of these new surroundings, quickly relaxed 
from the pain and strain of the day. Again he 
sees her lithe and graceful figure parting the 
bushes as she tries to follow some rippling strand 
of bird song to its source, or to catch a glimpse 
of some new arrival from the south; he sees her 
bending low to catch the fragrance of a newly 
opened blossom, her face lit up with a glow from 
the blushing flower's heart, or standing as motion- 
less and graceful as a statue fresh from the chisel 
of a Greek master, her eyes fixed on some bird 
which in silence is watching her, both lost in 
mutual surprise and admiration. The leafless elm 
is green again in his reverie, and the golden oriole, 
moving deftly from limb to limb, is languidly utter- 
ing his liquid notes. He smells anew the fresh 



CLEARING SKIES lOS 

odor from the clover fields as he sees her leaning 
on the zigzag rail fence, two tiny shoe tips peep- 
ing from below the skirt of blue, listening with 
happy, radiant face to the bobolinks as they fly 
and sing in an ecstasy of joy over the fragrant 
meadows. 

The horse's feet strike the loose planks of the 
river bridge, giving back a hollow, creaking sound, 
and the last vision picture is jarred from the kalei- 
doscope of thought. As one awakes from pleasant 
dreams to the cold realities from which the visions 
of sleep temporarily wooed him, he faces again a 
wintry world where leaf and blossom have faded 
and from which both Vera and the birds have 
flown. The leafless branches of the great elms 
arch the roadway like the ribs of a cathedral in 
ruins, and the oriole's nest, empty and forsaken, 
now half filled with the newly fallen snow, swings 
in the keen night air. The birches at the foot of 
the pasture, where the vesper songs of the thrush 
filled the summer twilight with mellow music, now 
stand leafless and naked, their white forms shiv- 
ering in the increasing cold and their upper deli- 
cate stems etched in black on the pink sky where 
the last light of the sunken sun is fading. No 
meadow larks rise on swift-beating wings from 
the snow-covered hillside where only a few months 
ago the tall timothy rippled away like the waves 
on an emerald lake; and the level field beyond the 
river is now white and silent where then the yellow 



104 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

wheat ran in billows before the wind as the swal- 
lows wheeled and turned above it as above a sea 
of gold. The mullein stalks, where the goldfinches 
had swayed and rocked as they sang their songs 
of contentment, now stand stark and brown above 
the snow. The hillside orchard is leafless, where 
he had spent some of the happiest hours of his 
life, when Vera had pointed out the warblers while 
bees among the blossoms filled the air with a low, 
sweet hum, and every breath of wind made a 
mimic snowstorm of the scented petals. 

Involuntarily, his thought followed Vera's birds. 
He recalled having seen, a few weeks before, as 
he had driven along the roads, robins and spar- 
rows and bobolinks in scattered flocks, flying 
hastily and stealthily from fence to fence and 
from field to field. They seemed to be lingering 
in silence and sadness about familiar places, de- 
laying from day to day a reluctant departure 
from romantic spots where they had mated and 
nested. The younger birds, without song or spirit, 
furtively flew about the hedges and in the or- 
chards as if loath to leave the places where life 
had first opened to them among the blossoms and 
where they had first known the ecstasy of song 
and flight. 

Some secret instinct, however, had been urging, 
and urging imperiously, and at last, in obedience 
to its commands, they arose and on silent wings 
were off; the call of the inner voice had been 



CLEARING SKIES 105 

obeyed and they swept in great flocks southward. 
Like Abraham of old, they sought a country, but 
knew not whither they went. But the inner im- 
pulse, in which they had trusted even to the utter- 
most, had neither deceived nor betrayed them. 
Nature had kept faith with the mighty host of feath- 
ered songsters. Safe beyond the snow and winds 
of winter. Dr. Colvin knew that the little ruby- 
throated humming bird was balancing himself on 
whirring wings before some brilliant blossom in 
the forests of Brazil, and that the swallows were 
skimming over the waters that held the reflected 
image of palm and cypress. The little sandpiper 
was bowing on the white sand of a beach where 
the festoon and tangle of Panama vines crowded 
to the water's margin, and the robin was taking 
his evening bath in some inland lake whose 
depths were frescoed with the blue of Southern 
skies. 

Far down the valley he sees the maple tops 
black against the sky, and not less clearly does he 
see, in his imagination, a grave beneath them, 
covered for the first time with snow. But that 
grave is not colder in the clasp of winter than are 
the icy fingers that clutch anew at his heart- 
strings as his thought goes round again that weary 
beaten circle that leads to no conclusion. Only 
afresh does the iron enter his soul as he thinks of 
a universe that thus provides for the summer 
birds, but makes no provision for her who was 



106 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of more worth than all the birds of all the sum- 
mers. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GRATE 

When the evening meal was over he turned at 
once to his little study. The only picture that 
caught his gaze as he entered was the one on the 
study table, where, from out an oaken frame, 
there looked a fair young face. The fire in the 
grate threw out a cheerful welcome on this No- 
vember night, filling the room with yellow radiance 
that alternately brightened and faded away as 
the flames rose and fell, revealing, then concealing 
the pictures on the wall and causing the girlish 
face in the oaken frame to grow distinct, then 
grow dim in shadowy vagueness, as if an inter- 
ested but hindered spirit was striving to speak 
from out the mysteries. 

The lamp was still unlit, and he filled his pipe 
to rest a little and let the glow of the grate dispel 
the last lingering chill of this first winter's ride. 
The fragrant smoke drifted in thin blue clouds 
above his strong and not unhandsome face 
where both intellect and depth of emotion were 
indelibly stamped. Now and then the light from 
the fire threw his features momentarily into relief, 
revealing as perhaps the noontide light would not 
have done lines which only sorrow can bring to 
a spirit that can feel even as deeply as it can 
think. In his clear brown eyes, now fixed upon 



CLEARING SKIES 107 

the burning embers, there was a shade of that 
fleeting sadness which comes not from books or 
schools, but from experience. Life, as long as he 
could see it from the point of view of a thinker, 
was to him a problem; now that he interpreted it 
through his feelings it was a tragedy. 

The thread of thought which he had been in- 
voluntarily following on his winter ride was again 
picked up. By a subtile law of association the 
mind, in whose mysterious depths lie hidden many 
a treasured picture, as in the sea lies unseen many 
a delicately tinted shell, began to throw, one by 
one, upon the beach of recollection many a cher- 
ished and happy memory. 

He recalls a fresh warm morning of April when 
he discovered beneath a currant bush in the gar- 
den a strange bird. It was a migrant, and, either 
exhausted by a long flight or else injured by com- 
ing in contact with an unseen branch or wire in 
the night, had fallen to the ground, and beneath 
the bush had sought concealment 

He hastened along the hedge to the bridge that 
leads to the Meldrum orchard, happy in the good 
fortune that furnished so plausible a reason for 
such an early morning call. But early as he was. 
Vera was already in the woodland pasture, tak- 
ing an inventory of the bird stock on hand to see 
if any had arrived during the night that had not 
reported with a song at her bedroom window. 

Some pictures hang on the walls of our memory 



108 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

as Raphael's masterpiece hangs on the walls of 
the gallery at Vienna, or as Millet's hangs on the 
walls of the Louvre; they are priceless. We 
would not attempt to measure their value in 
material terms. The doctor held the half -finished 
pipe in his hand while thin films of smoke floated 
before his eyes unseen, for he is looking at a morn- 
ing picture such as even the brush of Corot never 
painted. The soft warm light of an April dawn 
is upon the earth; the fresh meadows are dotted 
with the gold of uncounted dandelions, and every 
grass blade holds a dew drop that sparkles in the 
fresh light like a diamond. The new velvety 
leaves of bush and tree are green with a tender 
shade for which there is no name, and the un- 
ruffled water of the little river is pink with the 
borrowed blush of morning. This but furnishes 
a fit background and setting for the figure of a 
girl whose face, like a torch, lights up the scene 
with a vital interest as through it, as through a 
transparent medium, shines the radiant joy of 
youth and life. 

She did not at first recognize the bird which he 
had brought. He recalls how with a keenness of 
observation and a logical inference that would 
have done justice to the best of Scotland-Yard, 
she attempted from its physical characteristics to 
discover its native abode. At last her face sud- 
denly lighted up with that look of pleasure and 
victory that comes from discovery, as she declared 



CLEARING SKIES 109 

it to be a golden plover. He recalls the enthu- 
siasm with which she told the story of this bird's 
life and went into the details of its wondrous 
migratory habits. 

The golden plover spends its summers in the 
far north, rearing its young on the great barren 
tundras beyond the Arctic Circle. In July they 
gather in flocks and cross the Hudson Bay to 
Labrador, and from there pass to Nova Scotia. 
A little later from the southern shores of this 
peninsula they wing their way out over the open 
sea, and in one unbroken flight across more than 
two thousand miles of ocean they reach the north- 
ern shores of South America. From here they 
pass overland to their winter home on the pam- 
pas of Argentina. Those spending their summer 
in the neighborhood of Alaska migrate across the 
Pacific to China, and some, in an unbroken flight 
of over three thousand miles, reach mid-ocean 
isles south of the equator. 

The pipe had gone out, and from the half 
overturned bowl in his heedless hand the white 
ashes were sifting to the floor; through the blue 
smoke that now stretched before his eyes like the 
filmy clouds of summer he was watching the pic- 
tures of the past unroll. 

There was in Colvin's memory a May-day in 
which the flowers did not fade, and in which 
the fresh fragrance of the spring did not die out 
of the air. It was the day that Vera from early 



110 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

morning till twilight followed the birds in the blos- 
soming orchard, and identified by the distinctive 
color markings on wings and head and breast 
nearly twoscore different members of the warbler 
family. She explained to him, what he had not 
known before, that these tiny members of the 
bird kingdom were guests at Elmwood only for 
the day, having stopped off for a few hours' rest 
after their long journey from Mexico and Central 
America, or even from far-away Brazil; at dark 
they would be off again on their way to their 
summer homes in the great pine forests of the 
north. 

These little voyagers of the air were pushing 
on without compass over an uncharted sea 
where no signal lights flashed a single guiding ray. 
But they would not be disappointed, for the sun, 
now swinging up from the south, was touching 
with its transforming wand the cold depths of the 
Canadian forests. 

The last Sunday afternoon that he saw Vera in 
health, she called him from the porch to the edge 
of the lawn, to see some young swallows that had 
just left their nest. From the ridge of the barn 
they were taking their first view of the great 
green world. They were stretching and flutter- 
ing their untried wings in answer to the inner 
impulse that was urging them to be off. But the 
stone-paved roadway below was edged with rough 
boulders and sharp-edged rock which meant death 



CLEARING SKIES 111 

should the impulse betray, and the trusted wings 
fail to sustain the weight that was put upon them. 
They made repeated starts only each time to 
settle back again on the stable footing of the roof 
with much twittering and mutual congratulations 
that they still were there and alive. Vera laughed 
merrily as she called to them to leave their silly 
fears behind. At last a puff of air seemed to throw 
its strength alongside their feeble wills and one 
plunged off the gable's edge; all the others im- 
mediately followed. The universe that moment 
was on trial. Instinct had been trusted and, now, 
would it betray? The swift downward beat of 
the graceful wings was instantly met by the up- 
ward reaction of the air, and the young birds 
swept out over the stony roadway and above 
the topmost branches of elm and maple, round 
and round in the first wild ecstasy of flight. 

This, too, was the day that at the sundial on 
the lawn, with her face so close to his that he 
still feels the warmth of her breath, she pointed 
out that the sun's shadow was just touching the 
mark that indicated the time for the humming 
bird's return. 

He recalls that as she lay on the couch the 
afternoon of that black day in May, a smile 
flitted over her face as she saw the humming 
bird flitting from rose to rose in that maze of 
bloom that arched the window. 

And could there be in the scheme of things, 



112 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

thought the doctor, a provision for the needs of 
the little feathered warblers, frail voyagers of the 
night, threading the darkness without compass or 
chart, and for the humming bird, that throbbing 
mite of fragile life, as like a dart shot from an 
invisible bow it sped through tropic wildness and 
through the maze of mountain and desert, and 
yet there be no provision to reward the confidence 
and meet the aspirations and the hopes of Vera's 
ardent and eager spirit? 

Would a rational world keep faith with the 
Arctic plover as, trusting the wisdom of a voice 
not her own, she left firm shores behind and fear- 
lessly winged her course out over the ocean, where 
the waves rose and fell in blue billows to the 
horizon, and yet betray the trust of a young life 
expectant with a thousand hopes, who, without 
misgivings, leaves familiar places to journey into 
the great mystery? To the sea-bird's searching 
gaze at last, above the ocean's rim, lifts the green 
and stately groves of palm and pine; and did Vera, 
who never questioned the high hopes of her noblest 
hours nor doubted the deepest voices of her heart, 
see no sky grow crimson before her? Did she see 
no green hills looming up in front, whose slopes 
were decked with radiant bloom, and no valleys 
where little rivers laughed, and where the soft air 
trembled with the music of innumerable songs? 

Would the universe honor the faith of a fledgling 
swallow that, in obedience to an inner impulse, 



CLEARING SKIES 113 

trusts its all to untried wings, and would the 
white pinions of Vera's spirit beat the empty 
spaces all in vain as it, fluttering, sank to void 
oblivion? Would nature turn Iscariot and betray 
with a kiss of promise a hungry heart throbbing 
with hope and reaching upward for the unreached 
ideals? In the day of our need as we ask for 
bread are we given a stone; as we ask for an egg 
are we given a scorpion? Does an intelligent 
universe break down in the supreme hour and 
cease to be rational at the point where we expect 
it to be most so? 

An ember fell in the grate and a fresh flame 
sprang up that flashed a clear light on the face in 
the oaken frame; a flash of hope, too, lit up a 
sorely puzzled heart. Anything might be possible 
out in the great unknown, he thinks, save that no 
upward reaching path stretched before her eager, 
hurrying feet. Anything might have happened 
save that the darkness did not break into dawn, 
and the silence break into music before her. 

One object only of those tragic spring days 
stands out clear in his recollection; all else is but 
a confused medley of sounds and shadows. Deep 
etched upon his memory is her face, white and 
silent, but touched with infinite peace. A faint 
smile of mingled surprise and subtile wonder 
lingers there, such as he had seen at times flit 
across her features as she watched the changing 
glory of sunset colors of more than usual bril- 



114 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

liancy and beauty, or as she listened at some 
twilight hour to the warbling notes of some 
strange new song. As the frozen surface of a 
river permanently holds the last wave of the rip- 
pling water as it changed to ice, and as clay, 
hardening in the cast, holds the last molding 
touch of the finger of the artist, did not her peace- 
ful features hold in this fixed expression the im- 
press of the fresh and happy wonder her spirit 
knew as, departing, she faced the dawn of a new 
morning and the wondrous shores of a new experi- 
ence? 

He stepped to the window and looked out upon 
a white and silent world. The storm had ceased, 
and not a breath of air moved the naked branches 
of the trees whose delicate shadows in the moon- 
light made a net-work upon the snow. The 
meadows and sloping hillsides lay as trackless and 
as stainless as the snow fields of the upper Alps 
where no human foot has left a print. 

He stood for some time in silence as the big 
tears fell fast and unrestrained, striking his coat 
and shattering themselves into a thousand silvery 
fragments that gleamed for a moment like dia- 
monds in the moonlight. At last he said: "O, 
Vera, faith such as yours was not blind credulity, 
but the far reach of human reason. I trusted the 
universe a little way, but you, like the birds, 
trusted to the uttermost. Somewhere in this 
great star-lit universe to-night you are, and the 



CLEARING SKIES 115 

cup is full. Somewhere for you life's beckoning 
ideals have become reality, and earth's noblest 
dreams have become your experience." 

His eyes were looking away where the snow- 
covered hills were lost in the sky-background 
behind them, and where the twinkling lights 
from the windows of distant homes on the 
hillsides were not to be distinguished from the 
stars that burned in the mighty depths of 
space beyond. In his thought, too, the things of 
near and far strangely mingled. The border line 
between time and eternity was blotted out and 
the things of earth and heaven were woven into 
a seamless robe of love and hope. 

WISDOM OLDER THAN THE SCHOOLS 

Sunday Evening, November 8, 
I RECALL a day when I was but a boy, when 
the farmers were filling in with gravel the ap- 
proach to the then new bridge across the Oatka. 
A hundred loads or more had been taken out of 
the pit, when, late in the afternoon, they un- 
covered the skeleton of an Indian; judging from 
the articles that had been buried with him and 
which were still there, he was a warrior in his 
tribe. As the bones were laid upon the grass, 
my boyish imagination clothed them again with 
flesh. I pictured to myself his moccasined feet 
moving silently over the forest leaves as he stalked 
some hapless foe, and his dusky hand drawing the 



116 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

bow-string that sent the humming arrow on its 
mission of death. Long that day I held in my 
hand the skull, as Hamlet held the skull of poor 
Yorick, and I thought of the hot passions that 
once had throbbed in that empty shell; I looked 
into the empty eye sockets and mused of the pic- 
tures that once had been imagined there. 

By his side were a number of flint arrowheads 
from what evidently once was a full quiver and 
close at hand was an earthen vessel, half filled 
with corn, the kernels blackened as if burnt with 
fire but still retaining their original form. Thus, 
these children of the forest had provided arrows 
for the chase and food for the long journey of the 
departed warrior, against the time when he would 
pitch his tepee in the land of the Great Spirit. 

Whenever a heart meets the experience of los- 
ing one that it loves, this conviction springs in- 
stantly into being. It is true among the jungle 
tribes of darkest Africa, it is true among the 
naked islanders of the Pacific. It was true of the 
dwellers of the most ancient world. In the earli- 
est times, in Egypt, in Assyria, and in Greece, 
precious things were given to the dead that were 
denied the living, and those who remained dwelt 
in huts while the cold forms of the departed were 
housed in palaces. Through all the centuries the 
belief in a future existence has been a dominant 
article in the creed of humanity. 

And this has been true, not simply of the igno- 



CLEARING SKIES 117 

rant and the superstitious, where fear and impulse 
were unguided by reason, but it is a beHef that has 
grown more imperious in men's minds as they 
have grown in knowledge and in depth of feeling 
and in power of thought. It has blossomed out 
in its greatest beauty in the greatest and the 
brightest of mankind. Socrates lay down to die 
with perfect assurance that the darkness would 
break into morning before him. Cato laments 
for his dead son, but feels sure that he will see him 
again. Interest in life for Cicero goes out when 
his beloved daughter, Tullia, dies; the farm, the 
city, the Forum, all lose for him their charm, and 
he retires to the quiet of his library to see if he 
can, by the power of thought, discern a firm bridge 
across which her maiden feet have passed to the 
shores beyond. Dante does not doubt that he 
shall see again the face of that beloved Beatrice. 
Gladstone retired from the great political battles 
of the English forum and hung his sword and his 
armor above the grate at Hawarden; then among 
his books in his last years, he mused of life far 
beyond the blue Welsh hills that hemmed him in. 
Emerson sings that if hearts are dust, hearts' 
love remains, and he shall see his hyacinthine 
boy again; and Tennyson follows the disappear- 
ing form of his schoolboy friend, but knows that 
if he is lost, he is lost in light. 

Though "passing away" is written on all he 
sees, man pays himself this high and chivalrous 



118 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

tribute of believing in his own immortality. The 
beauty of the flower fades even as he admires it, 
and the oaks about him, though for a time they 
may wave their giant branches in defiance to the 
forces that would destroy, sooner or later come 
crashing down. Empires perish and pass away 
and society changes about him; he sees the in- 
creasing marks of time on the faces of those he 
loves, and at last he lays them away, and the eyes 
that were responsive to his own turn to white 
ashes and the hands that were warm in his clasp 
become cold dust. And yet, in the midst of this 
reign of change and decay, he says, "We shall 
live." 

Bees in constructing the honey cells of the hive 
reveal a plan and an intelligence which none of 
them consciously possesses. The ant solves prob- 
lems which puzzle the calculations of the best 
engineers, and the spider, in the silken web it 
weaves, demonstrates truths which Euclid failed 
to understand. The realm of instinct is deeper 
with significance than man can grasp, as the star 
spaces are vaster with mystery than he can 
measure. 

There is an intelligence in life other and deeper 
than the intelligence of the schools; there is a 
wisdom in life other and deeper than that which 
is the outcome of the individual's experience. In 
man's heart there are instinctive convictions that 
are not the product of his reasoning. They are 



CLEARING SKIES 119 

the reflections of reality. As the snow-capped 
mountains about a Swiss lake cast their images 
in the clear water there, eternal reality images 
itself in the human mind. From the cave man, 
shambling out of prehistoric night, chanting his 
inarticulate sorrow to the stars, to Tennyson sing- 
ing his song of triumph in "Crossing the Bar," 
the human heart has in its deep desire been giving 
back an echo of the Eternal voice that has spoken 
there. 

A BLOSSOM ABOVE THE MOLD 

Sunday Evening, November 15. 

When Michael Angelo was asked to paint a 
fresco, his first concern was as to the permanency 
of the wall where he was to leave the creations of 
his genius. If he had known that his work was 
not to last, his hand would have lost its cunning. 

If Phidias could have looked down the future 
and seen across the wide landscape of the years 
his beautiful temple in ruins, its frieze broken, its 
columns fallen, the great sculptured groups of the 
pediment torn from their places and dismembered 
and the fragments carried away to distant lands; 
if he could have seen in remote prospect this fate 
befall his beloved Parthenon, would not his hand 
have lost something of its skill and his heart 
something of its fire? 

In the cathedral-building era, fathers and sons 
to the third and fourth generation joined their 



120 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

labors, inspired by one great common purpose. 
They laid deep foundations, they lifted tier by 
tier the noble walls, and with infinite labor 
crowned their work with commanding towers and 
cloud-piercing spires. When at last the structure 
stood completed, the aspirations of a people out- 
lined in graceful, noble form against the sky, can 
we tolerate the thought that on the proud day of 
its dedication, as a planned or long foreseen part 
of the celebration, some mighty explosion would 
be set off that would shake the pile of dreaming 
stone to its foundations, so that when the white 
clouds of dust drifted slowly away, nothing would 
remain but tottering walls, and broken columns, 
and fallen arch and spires? 

If the generally accepted views of science are 
correct, step by step through the ages has an 
increasing purpose struggled toward the perfect- 
ing of the human spirit as its goal. Out of the 
school of hunger and want, out of the fires of 
unmeasured struggle and pain, out of the aeons of 
mist and gloom and heat and cold, man at last 
emerges, rises and walks, and lifts his questioning 
face to the stars. Vaguely he begins to grasp the 
meaning of himself and of the world in which he 
lives. How long and unerring the process and how 
patient the purpose by which the rude, crude brain 
of a wallowing monster, so coarse of fiber that it 
can serve but as the medium of no finer emotions 
than the dark wild passions of Paleozoic hate and 



CLEARING SKIES 121 

greed, is changed to that delicate organism that 
translates the lightest fancy that the moonbeams 
suggest, and catches, like an aeolian harp, the music 
from the softest breeze that blows. 

How many times did the tender light of morn- 
ing and of evening blush and fade through the 
uncounted ages, during how many nights did the 
moonlight play over forgotten seas, before it 
awakened a responsive appreciation such as the 
spirit of Vera gave? How many times did the 
stars trace their golden circles of light in the 
black dome above before mind grew capable as 
hers was to catch in thought their reflected laws 
and message? A million mothers groped their 
way through the darkness and the loneliness of 
primitive nights when the protector of the cave 
or tent came not back from the battle or the 
chase; a million unkempt fathers fought the hard 
fight of life, their foreheads bleeding from the 
bludgeon blows of fate; a myriad of hearts ached 
and broke through the long years that out of these 
purging fires of the ages her spirit might emerge 
white and chaste. 

Vera's life was the product of the aeon-long 
movement, the goal toward which from the begin- 
ning the increasing purpose ran. She was a flower 
blooming above the travail of uncounted centuries 
even though deep into its soil the roots of her being 
sank. The world grew old to make her young. 

Nothing in the world is so suggestive of the 



122 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

blotting out of a human spirit as is the destruction 
of a noble piece of art. But no artist could en- 
tertain, as a part of a rational plan, the ultimate 
purpose to destroy his masterpiece. Yet I would 
find it easier to believe that a sculptor might toil 
through long years to shape the unyielding stone 
to the lines of his vision, only when finished, to 
shatter it with one fell blow; easier to believe that 
a painter might mix his tints until his hair lost its 
gloss and his eye its fire, only in the end to tear 
the completed canvas to tatters, than it would be 
to believe that an age-long purpose, through in- 
finite effort, would produce a human spirit such 
as Vera, only when produced to let it sink back 
again to dreamless dust. 

THE LOOM OF TIME 

Sunday Evening, November 22. 
The whence of human life, from a purely ab- 
stract point of view, is as interesting and as impor- 
tant as is the whither of it. The cradle is as sug- 
gestive of query as is the grave. If the mountain 
ranges in front are too steep and rugged to scale 
to catch from their summits a view of the far 
country, so too loom up the unclimbed ranges 
cutting off the view behind. The earthly career 
is the short segment of a great curve sweeping 
forward on the one hand into golden cloud-wrap- 
ped distances, and backward, on the other, into 
vague vistas of mystery. Life is like the bird of 



CLEARING SKIES 123 

the Saxon story that flies a little while in the glar- 
ing light, as out of the night it enters the ban- 
queting hall through one window, only soon to 
pass out of the opposite one into the night again. 

Science, whose conclusions once wholly satisfied 
my mind, attempts to understand man in his 
physical make-up by studying the past. The foot- 
prints that Crusoe saw in the sand of his desert 
island are followed back over rough and devious 
ways across the centuries until they are lost in 
the hoofprints and clawmarks of the primeval 
jungle. The rows of pearly teeth which the happy 
laughter of a child reveals, suggests a period and 
a usage far remote; they are survival forms from 
the days when their originals gnashed and snapped 
behind snarling lips, or crunched the reeds that 
grew rank by stagnant waters. Man from this 
point of view is understood by understanding the 
beast below him. 

The fabric of his mental life, too, is unraveled, 
and the separate strands are followed back in 
order to discover their origins in the loom of time. 
By ingenious and plausible analysis our mental 
furnishings, our ethical sentiments, our religious 
aspirations, are traced back to the rude savage 
mind, or to the psychology of shaggy monsters 
whose vacant stare never beheld the form of man. 
A little child screams at the sight of a wriggling 
snake though there has been nothing in its experi- 
ence to explain this fear; it is, they say, a left-over 



124 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

feeling from the days of a darker and more dan- 
gerous period, when our half -clothed ancestors, 
grouped about their blazing forest fire, were sur- 
prised by the sudden approach out of the bushes 
and the night of a death-dealing serpent whose 
movement was as silent as that of a shadow, and 
against whose coming there was no guarding. 
The pleasures of art had their beginning in the 
experience of the little primitive child when it 
associated the curving lines of the mother's breast 
with the satisfaction of an appeased hunger, and 
the thrill of music sprang from the contented purr 
of the tigress as she felt the warmth of her cubs 
beside her. The sense of authority in the voice 
of conscience, before which we bow, is but the 
echo of far-off bellowings when the king beast of 
the herd with flashing eye and lashing mane 
asserted the power of the strong over the weak. 
The religious sentiment, expressed when a great 
congregation lifts its voice in some anthem of 
praise till the vaulted arches send back an echo, 
is but an emotion, now deepened and enriched, 
which ages ago in its primitive form was expressed 
in the howl of the pack as wolves bayed on lonely 
hills to the moon. 

And was Vera's comeliness of form and her 
charm of movement, then, but the refinement of 
feline litheness, and of the weasel's sinuous grace, 
and was the lightness of her step but borrowed 
from the panther's cushioned tread .^^ And were 



CLEARING SKIES 125 

her airy dreams of fancy, her buoyant moods of 
hope, her unselfish noble purposes, but distilled 
from the emotions that slowly moved the sluggish 
brain of the ox or fired the hot heart of the tiger? 

There is something in the lily with its tinted 
petals and its scented sweetness which no analysis 
of the roots can explain no matter how far out in 
the black muck out of which it grows the tiny 
fibers may be followed. And there was some- 
thing in the spirit of this girl whose mind caught 
gleams of beauty from every flash of the world's 
light, who heard soft music in every breeze that 
rippled in the leaves, and saw a meaning imaged 
in every blossom and flash of swallow's wing as 
she saw the sky and the stars imaged in the little 
river; there was something in this spirit of tender 
fancies and lofty ideals and beckoning hopes 
which cannot be accounted for by any juggling, 
however subtile or ingenious, of the factors of the 
beast life below us. Rather would I believe with 
Plato that her origin is to be found in celestial 
heights, and that the love and joy of her life was 
but the dew of heaven still fresh upon her young 
spirit. Rather would I believe that the haunting 
ideals were shadowy recollections of reality in her 
native realm, and that music and beauty were 
sweet to her because they were vaguely reminis- 
cent of the home that she had left. 

Truly, man is a mystery; in him meet strange 
and opposite forces. The earth dust and the star 



126 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

dust are both alike in his make-up. The song of 
the angels and the growl of the tiger both start 
echoes in his heart. From the middle levels in 
the Alps one can look down into yawning abysses 
where the river roars in sullen anger in the shad- 
ows, or he can look up to the peaks gleaming 
above him like burnished gold in the sunlight. 
There is the upward and the downward look in 
human nature. 

When, however, the Great Reader of the human 
heart said, "How much is a man better than a 
sheep!" even though he may not have excluded 
the thought that man was a partaker of the ani- 
mal nature, yet he did imply that he rose so far 
above it that only an exclamation could express 
the contrast. And the upward look in life is al- 
ways the truest look; optimism, not pessimism, 
is the final philosophy. One rift in the clouds 
through which shines the blue of the sky is the 
revelation of a fact which all the mists and fogs 
that may blacken the heavens cannot contradict. 
One pink bud of the arbutus on the side of the 
hill, is an evidence of spring which all the leafless 
trees and water-soaked fields cannot gainsay. 
When I get a gleam of humanity interpreted to 
me through Vera's life, then, regardless of all 
that is gross and contradictory in human nature, 
I know to what lineage man belongs and in whose 
image he is made. 

It was this consciousness of personal relation- 



CLEARING SKIES 127 

ship with the divine that led the ancient psalmist 
to exclaim, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol; 
neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see cor- 
ruption." It is this sense of personal relation- 
ship that gives measureless significance to the 
Master's words spoken in the Upper Room, 
"Because I live, ye shall live also." In her en- 
thusiasm for beauty and music, in her ardent 
hopes and ideals, in her unshaken loyalty to truth, 
in her life of gentle love. Vera Meldrum knew a 
oneness with the Eternal. The Infinite beat into 
her quiet life as the ocean tide beats into some 
little river until far inland in sleeping meadows 
and flower-decked dells there is the pulse and 
swing of the shoreless deep. It is not blind faith, 
but the deepest voice of brain and heart that 
whispers to-night: "She lives in God." 

WILD WINGS 

Sunday Evening, November 29, 
I HAVE never forgotten the impression made 
upon my young mind when for the first time I 
visited the great Museum of Natural History in 
New York. The features there which especially 
captured my boyish imagination were the ex- 
hibits of prehistoric life. The great skeletons of 
that perished era fascinated me as I tried 
to picture in my mind the lumbering monsters 
that splashed their clumsy ways through primeval 
swamps. 



128 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

On the wall, immediately behind each exhibit, 
was a great panel-painting where the artist had 
attempted to depict the landscape conditions 
which existed when the animal was here. These 
paintings are not the result simply of the artist's 
imagination, but in each instance the details were 
determined by a careful study of the fossil re- 
mains. The form of the teeth revealed the nature 
of the vegetation upon which it subsisted; the 
structure of the limbs indicated the nature of the 
land and water conditions where its life was 
spent; the claws and tusks and armor plate it 
wore gave some information as to the animals 
with which it carried on either an offensive or a 
defensive war. Thus, step by step, a study of the 
fossil remains enabled the scientist to build up the 
landscape conditions in the midst of which its lot 
was cast. 

The external world of that lost era is recon- 
structed on the theory that a want, indicated by 
skeleton structure, is a sure prediction of the 
existence of conditions which meet and satisfy 
that want. Structure in the physical world is 
prophetic. The eye, with its delicate adjustments, 
speaks of light, as the ear, with its labyrinth of 
arrangements, does of sound. 

This is a world of rational adjustments, and we 
do not pass from, but rather to its highest ration- 
ality when we pass from the realm of the physical 
to the realm of spirit. How prophetic is a human 



CLEARING SKIES 129 

soul! A great ship of the hne, idly sleeping on 
the waveless water of a landlocked harbor, with 
its wide spread of canvas, its hold stored with 
food supply for many months, its great anchor 
chains forged to withstand the strain of wave and 
tempest, its compass and sextant adjusted to get 
directions, not from the earth but the sky, does 
not speak more of the wind-swept ocean than does 
a human spirit in its faculties and tendencies 
speak of a wider and higher sphere of action than 
this world furnishes. Like a caged eagle it has 
pinions fitted, not for the narrow limitations which 
close encompassing conditions impose, but for the 
blue above the mountain crags. 

Astronomy is the oldest of the sciences. Before 
he understood the world beneath his feet, or the 
immediate surroundings upon which his very 
existence depended, man strove to solve the mean- 
ing and message of the stars. If this life is the 
whole of his career, the horse, or the sheep, or the 
ox, is better adapted to its surroundings than is 
man, who forever reaches beyond the present, 
seeking satisfaction in some environment which 
as yet he has not found. With a passionate affec- 
tion he follows the departing forms of his loved 
ones as they disappear in the mystery, cherishing 
through the long years the fond hope of reunion; 
he has a wealth of love which, if there is no future, 
makes him less adapted to successful living than 
is the bird whose loss of a mate silences his song 



130 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

but for a day. Visions of something better than 
he is, or better than he has, forever beckon 
him. 

Now the restless and radiant spirit of Vera 
predicted an environment which neither this val- 
ley nor any other earthly vale did or could furnish. 
Happy though she was, I know that her heart's 
high hopes, her visions of beauty and harmony 
and love, all spoke of an adjustment which the 
art or the music or the friendships of the years 
could not have supplied. 

The silent father, in his talks with me, had 
never mentioned Vera's name since her death, 
until a few weeks ago. He met the world with his 
quiet stoical attitude, characteristic of himself and 
his race, but we all knew how behind his outward 
indifference was the measureless sense of loss. We 
met on the footbridge across the river just at 
twilight; the vesper sparrows were singing in the 
pasture along the hills, and, as we talked, the 
thrushes began their familiar evening symphony 
in the birches. We both heard them and were 
silent. "It was years ago," he finally said, and 
though nothing in our conversation had led up 
to the remark, yet it did not seem abrupt, "when 
she was but a little girl, she discovered one after- 
noon at yonder bend of the river by the woods a 
shore bird from the northern lakes. She was de- 
lighted with the discovery, for she hoped that the 
bird would take up its summer home here. I told 




THE VESPERS OF THE THRUSHES 



CLEARING SKIES 131 

her that the wish was a vain one, for the fowl in 
its make-up and habits was not adapted to our 
inland valley, but to the open waters and the 
broad shore of wide seas; that after it had rested 
a little it would be off to its home. A day or two 
later at about this hour of the evening, a flock of 
its kind passed over, flying high, but their wild 
cries came down from the sky; it gave an answer- 
ing call, and we heard the splash of the water, the 
beating of its great pinions, and we watched it as 
it drifted northward across the background of the 
sunset sky until it disappeared. Henry, all these 
years I saw her grow more beautiful, more active, 
more happy, and to me more indispensable, but 
at times there came the haunting fear, and I know 
not whence it came, that I could not keep her. 
She heard the cry that called her to her own, 
and she followed." Then, as if speaking more 
to himself than to me, he said in a lowered tone, 
"She drifted beyond our vision, but she drifted 
home." 

He was silent, and his eyes were fixed on the 
golden glow of the western sky as if he were try- 
ing to trace her flight into the sunset glory as he 
had traced the form of the departing bird. The 
tears ran down his strong but now deeply lined 
face, but only for a moment; again he was master 
of himself and spoke of the weather, and the 
growing crops, as if the former line of thought had 
been wholly dismissed. 



132 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

DREAMS IN THE FORUM 

Sunday Evening^ December 6. 

The bell has been ringing in the twilight, call- 
ing the young people to their Sunday evening 
meeting. The throbbing vibrations have rolled 
across the evening air like billows of a sea, over 
which from the past have come swift ships with 
silken sails, bearing rich cargoes of priceless mem- 
ories. 

It was a little more than a year ago, when the 
Valley was touched with the first glow of autumn, 
that Vera returned from her trip to Europe. She 
had reached home at the end of the week, and 
Sunday afternoon furnished the first opportunity 
for an uninterrupted talk. We followed the river's 
winding way where the red leaves of the maple 
floated like unquenched embers on the surface of 
the water and the sunset stained its still places 
with pink and fire. Farther down the Valley the 
church tower, with its ivy now turned to scarlet, 
stood out in the landscape more beautiful than 
the painted towers of Venice, more gorgeous than 
Giotto's many-colored Campanilla in Florence. 

Her quick mind was like a kaleidoscope, bringing 
forth picture after picture, as in her enthusiasm 
she talked of the wonders of the Old World. Now 
it was the Scottish Trossachs of which she spoke, 
now her eyes sparkled with the keen pleasures 
of memory as she told of the waters of the Bonnie 
Doon flowing slowly between green banks where 



CLEARING SKIES 133 

the white hawthorn blossoms were reflected in 
its mirror surface. She described Loch Lomond's 
beauty, sparkHng in the sunlight like a diamond 
in its rugged setting of heathered braes and its 
birch and bracken-covered hills. 

She talked of London and its Temple Courts 
and old churches, and of the quiet but eventful 
day in Westminster Abbey when, awed and rever- 
ent, she had walked above the dust of those who 
had made England great and who had given glory 
to the Saxon race. 

Paris, with its treasures of art, had entranced her, 
and the glare of the great boulevards had charmed; 
yet something in the gay life of this world me- 
tropolis cast a shadow across her spirit, for her 
thoughts seemed to hasten from its lights and 
parade to the glory and grandeur of Switzerland 
and her mountains. How her face glowed as she 
talked of Mont Blanc, and Jungf rau, and the Mat- 
terhom, where the clouds tore to tatters their 
skirts on the splintered crags and where, far back 
on the high levels, the snow fields lay all untrod- 
den in a cold silence unbroken by the rustling of 
a leaf or the song of a bird. 

She told of the doves in the Piazza before the 
Cathedral of St. Mark's at Venice, and of the soft 
music and reflected lights that gave a strange 
spell to the night that hung over the watery 
streets. She talked of gulls that swarmed behind 
the ship as they steamed away from Queenstown 



134 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

until their uncounted wings filled the sky as 
Raphael crowded with graceful angel-pinions the 
sky -background of his Sistine Madonna. 

But evidently it was in old Florence that her 
thoughts loved best to linger. She reveled in the 
remembered beauty of the olive leaves rippling 
iEto silver against the bluest of blue skies by day, 
and of the lights from many windows dancing in 
long trembling lines of fire in the Arno by night. 

When we reached the church the room was 
filled with young people and the meeting had 
already commenced. I do not recall what the 
subject was, and perhaps, so far as Vera's words 
were concerned, it would have made but little 
difference, for any subject would have been fused 
in the ardor of her enthusiasm; it would have 
flowed in the current of her interests and been 
colored with the tint of her thought. 

With no trace of superiority on her part and 
no thought of pedantry on the part of those who 
listened, she spoke of an incident of one of the 
days that she spent amid the ruins of old Rome. 
As the sun began to sink and the broken walls of 
many ruins began to cast their long dark shadows 
across the Forum, even as the story of their fame 
and shame stretches in black lines across the cen- 
turies, she dismissed the guide and sat down on 
the base of a broken column to muse on the faded 
glory of a long-lost past. 

In her imagination she sees again the spaces of 



CLEARING SKIES 135 

the Forum crowded with motley groups, among 
which idly saunter the soldiers of Caesar's legions. 
Their arms are bare and bronzed with the sun 
and above their swarthy faces and massy hair 
gleam the polished helmets. Their armor clanks 
as they walk and their insolence and swagger 
reveal that they are not unconscious of their 
imperial standing. Down the broad, paved way 
she sees a grand procession move amid the shouts 
of thousands; it is a Roman triumph given to 
some chieftain who returns a conqueror from some 
foreign war. A wreath is on his brow and his 
prisoners with manacled hands and hard set faces 
follow his gilded chariot. On the hills that en- 
circle the Forum rise again to her vision the 
imperial palaces where dwell the Caesars; at their 
threshold the world's kings and princes kneel and 
beg for liberty or for life. 

But how different is this gorgeous picture 
which her imagination charms from the dead 
centuries from the scene of sordidness and ruin 
which meets her gaze on every hand. The House 
of the Virgins is a ruin and the fire which they 
kept burning through the years has long ago 
flickered out. The thronged aisles of Julian's mar- 
ket place are now a barren pavement, and between 
the blocks of the Triumphal Way, where the 
sandaled feet of the world's conquerors so proudly 
walked, undisturbed, the red clover blooms. The 
measured tread of the iron legions and the faces 



136 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

upon which scorn and pride were written have 
departed; crowns and spears and burnished swords 
no longer catch the gleam of the midday sun. 

She was reluctant to leave the Forum, but the 
fast-coming night obliged her to return to her 
hotel. On her way thither she stopped for a 
moment in the deep black arches of the Coliseum. 
Out of the shadows around her rose in a great 
circle, tier above tier, the broken galleries against 
the many-windowed back wall. Far above, where 
once the great torches waved in flame, the stars 
were beginning to shine; below a lizard ran along 
the floor where once the gladiator's feet in fren- 
zied energy trampled the sands that were moist 
with his last life's blood. On a crumbling pier a 
little bird sang sweetly, breaking with his simple 
song the silence which long ago hushed the tu- 
mult when the great throngs made the walls to 
rock and tremble with acclaim. The leaves of a 
bush which grew in the gallery of the nobles, 
rippled softly in the evening breeze, where once 
the silken scarfs of the women of the Csesars 
rustled and where the royal banners flapped lazily 
in the wind. The evening air, once heavy with 
the odor of flowers and stifling with perfume, 
blew now cool and fresh through the many open- 
ings. 

As she turned from the great hollow emptiness 
and faced again the city, far across the Tiber rose 
the swelling lines of Saint Peter's in the moonlight. 



CLEARING SKIES 137 

and above its height, looking down on the ruins 
of an empire, was that instrument of Roman 
cruelty and torture, the cross, now the world's 
symbol of love and hope. Then came to her mind 
the words of Him in whose name she was speak- 
ing: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my 
words shall not pass away." 

How could one have been otherwise than 
impressed by so earnest, and withal so gracious, 
a plea and pleader? Her words were as simple as 
they were direct, and the conclusion which they 
were intended to convey was not wholly lost on me. 

The most monumental assumption in history 
is that of this Jewish youth standing on the steps 
of the temple, clad in the garb that bespeaks his 
peasant origin, throwing his challenge to the de- 
stroying years, "Heaven and earth shall pass 
away, but my words shall not pass away." It 
might be called the utterance of irresponsible 
egotism, or the ravings of an unbalanced fana- 
ticism, were it not that two thousand years have 
come and gone, during which empires and king- 
doms have arisen and decayed, and His words still 
stand. 

The white-sailed ships have gone from the little 
lake of Tiberias and the fisherman's nets are no 
longer stretched to dry upon the beach. The 
lamp has gone out that burned in the Temple 
Court. The smoke of sacrifice no longer ascends 
from the sacred mount; the feet of the Gentiles 



138 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

have tramped in the Holy of Holies; strange 
tongues jabber a foreign speech in the streets of 
Jerusalem. The mighty powers of the then known 
world, the shadows of whose scepters on the earth 
were their only argument as they exercised un- 
bridled authority, live now only on the pages of 
the past's long story. The world as He knew it 
has passed away; his words have not passed away. 

To a group of anxious men standing on the 
mysterious borderland of the great unknown, he 
said with calm assurance, "Let not your hearts 
be troubled; in my Father's house are many 
dwelling places." He took two of earth's richest 
words, "father" and "home," and all the tender 
wealth of association which they suggest he 
pouied into the darkness to warm and mellow 
the far shores of death. Among the many sig- 
nificant hours of his life there is no one more 
significant than that in which he tightened the 
girdle of his toga and fastened the strings of his 
sandals, and without fear or faltering, entered 
confidently the great shadow. 

May it not be that the heavens, also, will pass 
away, as he said; its suns burn down like candles 
in their sockets, new constellations take shape in 
the midnight sky, but his words touching the 
great beyond lose none of their significance or 
their truth.^ 

So Vera believed, and confidently she met the 
great mystery. 



CLEARING SKIES 139 

VISIONS THAT DISTURB 

Sunday Evening, December IS. 

It was Sunday afternoon in early May; a warm 
shower which had been falling for several hours 
had ceased, and though the trees were still drip- 
ping the clearing skies were transfiguring the 
world into a wondrous freshness of life and color. 
A robin in the maple by the garden wall, pre- 
eminent soloist among the birds, was singing with 
a fervor that falling water had neither cooled nor 
dampened. The current of his little life, like the 
current of the little river beyond the blossoming 
orchard, was flowing even with its banks; the un- 
interrupted song of liquid notes ran over the brim 
of his cup which was too full longer to hold more 
of the mere joy of living. 

Vera had been listening with that rapt atten- 
tion which is the critic's highest compliment to 
genius; at last she said, speaking perhaps more to 
herself than to robin: "Poor little bird! Who 
would want to be as happy as you are? Your cup 
of life is not so large but that the sunshine and 
the showers of a May day can fill it." Vera was 
not given to much philosophizing; she simply 
possessed a woman's intuition for truth. She 
frequently saw at a glance what slower minds 
attained to only by weary climbing the ascending 
steps of the syllogism's premise and conclusion. 

How much she had been impressed and how 
often she had spoken of the joy that throbs in 



140 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

the life of the fields and wood! No discontent 
darkens the happy hours. The sunshine of the 
bluebird's summer is not shadowed by any grief 
because her coat is not of a more azure hue, nor 
does the oriole know any pangs of envy because 
his coat of gold does not glisten with a more bril- 
liant sheen. No plaintive note arising from the 
haunting echoes of a song sweeter than the one 
it sings, creeps in to dull the sweetness of the 
thrush's liquid melody. The bird in the elm's 
boughs that arch the river sings over and over, 
through the long summer, his faint refrain, but 
no hurried or anxious note is heard as if the re- 
peated performance was for the purpose of im- 
provement; the sweet contentment of the song 
seems possible only because no suggestion of 
imperfection is there. The little goldfinch, rock- 
ing in his swaying thistle, loses none of his happi- 
ness from visions of fairer garments than the ones 
he wears, or of a more artistic dwelling place than 
the wool-lined home in the lilac bush that he 
has builded. The squirrel scampering along the 
topmost rail of the zigzag fence, or lightly spring- 
ing from branch to branch of beech or maple, 
knows no shadow on the sunny path he nimbly 
travels because he is not lighter of foot or because 
he is not more agile to clear in safety a wider space 
from limb to limb. Among the little folk of field 
and woods there are no reformers and no mutual 
improvement associations, because they feel no 



CLEARING SKIES 141 

needier either. No haunting ideals, no beckoning 
goals disturb the happy present. No chasm yawns 
between what they are and what they want to 
be. The door of the past to them has gone shut, 
the door of the future has not yet opened, so they 
live in the eternal now where the real and the 
ideal meet and coincide. 

But when we turn from this contented joy 
that plays like a smile over the face of the fields 
and enter into the inner experiences of human 
life, the cup no longer overflows. A shadow now 
lies even on the sunniest path and there is a little 
pain down at the center of the cheeriest heart. 
In the undertow of the brightest song there is a 
strain of sadness and in the most exultant shout 
of victory there is a secret consciousness of defeat. 
The vision of the perfect forever haunts and 
sobers us. Vera's sky was always blue, yet it 
was flecked with clouds that dimmed the clear- 
ness; and though hers was the happiest of hearts, 
yet a fleeting sadness touched even her most 
joyous hours. 

Orators who have in light and happy hours 
moved the multitudes as the wind moves the rip- 
pling wheat, and in wrath have swayed and bent 
them as the storm bends and sways the mountain 
pines, have turned sadly away from what the 
world was pleased to call their triumphs; measur- 
ing their efforts by the ever haunting standards 
of perfection, they counted them but as failures 



142 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

and defeats. Raphael filled in his canvases with 
passion and with color, and men have made paths 
from the ends of the earth to the galleries where 
they hang, but the great artist himself died lament- 
ing that he had neither time nor strength to paint 
his masterpiece. Under the touch of Angelo's 
fingers the hard marble became plastic to his 
genius and the growing face, hour by hour as he 
labored, took on the lines of life and thought; the 
brow became noble with purpose and the lips 
subtile with shades of purity and love. But at 
last, when he looked down at the finished work, 
the finest example that the world has known of the 
human features incarnated in stone, the despair 
of failure in his great soul turned to wrath and 
with one mighty blow he shivered the white dream 
into fragments. The great violinist as the last 
sweet notes of his selection fade away, turns 
from the platform where over the footlights the 
wild applause is breaking like the billows of a sea; 
behind the curtain he lays down his violin, which 
is still trembling with the ecstasy of triumphant 
song, an awful fear clutching at his heart that he 
never can express the music of his soul. Beetho- 
ven, hatless and coatless, roamed the open fields 
at night, hearing the music that stole into his 
heart along the moonbeams from the stars; but 
he confessed that he never was able to catch in 
the meshes of his scale lines, or of his vibrating 
strings, all the melody that he heard. Paul, the 



CLEARING SKIES 14S 

tentmaker, was not only of no mean city, but of 
no mean attainments in the realm of character. 
The world recognizes him as one of her supreme 
moral heroes. But that life, to him, seemed so 
cheap and tawdry, as measured by the ideal that 
he longed to reach, that he cried out in an agony 
from the depths of his conscious moral defeat. 

Man measures himseK and his achievements by 
impossible standards. The faster he hastens on, 
the swifter moves the flying goal before him. The 
higher he climbs the rugged mountain path to the 
stars, the farther do they recede into the inac- 
cessible vault of the infinite. The ever-beckoning 
ideals is man's glory, and his ever-recurring failure 
to reach them is his constant cross and shame. 

The cup of human life, unlike that of the bird 
singing in the rain, is too large to be filled out of 
the experiences of the transient years, no matter 
how rich those experiences may be; but our dis- 
content is as prophetic as it is divine. Ideals are 
not formed on the benches of earthly factories 
nor forged into shape on any earthly anvils. They 
do not arise out of the ground, for they are not 
the product of the dust. Like the fiery chariot of 
Elijah they sweep down from above and carry us 
out of our lowly walk and thought. As Plato long 
ago told the Greek students as they walked among 
the glories of the Acropolis in the days when the 
Parthenon was new, our ideals are the thoughts 
of God haunting the thoughts and hearts of men; 



144 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

they are eternal types flashing in the midst of the 
perishing and the transient. They are luminous 
with unmeasured prophecy. They are not stand- 
ards by which to measure our defeat; they are 
beckoning goals on the mountain-tops that gleam 
with the promise of eternal victory. 

VOICE OF THE HILLS 

Sunday Evening, December 20, 
I SHALL never forget the evening that I spent 
a few weeks ago at the home of my old friend and 
college chum at Colorado Springs. Immediately 
after our graduation he entered business in Phila- 
delphia and met with more than usual success. 
A too close application to his work, however, had 
given to the scourge of the white man an oppor- 
tunity to fasten itself firmly upon him. As soon 
as he learned the true nature of his trouble, he 
hastened to Colorado, hoping that the mountain 
air together with the change of scene and the long 
needed rest would quickly restore him. But the 
first sight of his face, as I met him, revealed to me 
that he had come too late. 

We spent the evening on the little balcony at 
the rear of his cottage, and every breath of the 
cool fresh air seemed to reach the springs of life 
like a tonic. We followed the trails of thought 
that led into the past and talked of the old friends 
and the old days, and he grew cheerful again as 
we lived over many a happy hour. 



CLEARING SKIES 145 

There came to us while we talked the low roar 
of the city's activity, while across the level plains 
in front of us loomed up the majestic form of 
Pike's Peak. Its base was lost in the shadows of 
deepening night, but the heights glowed with a 
dull copperish pink from the light of what was to 
us a sunken sun. The great granite pile, shoulder- 
ing up the sky, stood impressive in its silent 
grandeur. It was the emblem of the immutable 
and imperishable, the symbol of the everlasting; 
it was a visible suggestion of eternity. Its tower- 
ing ruggedness looked down with complacent, if 
not indeed with contemptuous, indifference upon 
the life of change and decay that ebbed and 
flowed at its base. Thus it had stood when Caesar 
hesitated on the banks of the Rubicon, and when 
Leonidas held back the Persian host at Thermo- 
pylae. Thus it had stood, with the light of dying 
day upon it, when the metal of the Colossus of 
Rhodes lay unsmelted in the hills, and when the 
stone of which the Pyramids were built lay in 
undisturbed strata along the Nile. Thin wraiths 
of filmy cloud forms drifted across its impassive 
face, leaving it as unchanged as had the thousand 
winters that whitened its summit or the thousand 
summers that had bloomed and faded on its 
slopes. 

Conversation at last ceased, and in the silence 
we watched the light slowly fade from its rocky 
walls. The steady ticking of a clock came to us 



146 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

through the open door at our backs; in the still- 
ness there came sweetly the clear bell notes of the 
chimes of a distant tower, marking the flight of 
time. The clock and chimes seemed to suggest 
an order of thought, a measure of time and of 
life, strangely different and strongly contrasting 
to that which gently distilled into the mind from 
the mountain across the plain, where, in the linger- 
ing glow of departing day, it loomed up in the 
calm indifference of infinite leisure. 

Clock and chimes spoke of the reign and the 
tyranny of time. In its empire we live a harassed 
and feverish existence, ever driven on by the 
scourge of the flying hours. Each slow declining 
sun is watched with misgivings, for it reminds us 
of some stint of work undone; the first yellow and 
crimson leaves of autumn strike home to the 
heart with some rebuke because some harvest 
has not been reaped, some fruitage has not been 
gathered. The New Year bells tremble in the 
night and a loosened fragment of existence drops 
away, leaving for our work and plans a nar- 
rower range; every pulse beat is but the gurgling 
flow of life's stream down its narrow channels 
to the sea. The sands of the hourglass drop grain 
by grain, and with them, one by one, pass our 
friendships, our loves, our plans, our hopes. 

My friend at last broke the silence and said 
what both of us were thinking. "Colvin," and 
he used the old familiar college name, "I have 



CLEARING SKIES 147 

not spoken of the cause that brought me here, 
but that was unnecessary, for you understand. 
My plans have all ended, but it was not easy to 
give them up; I am only twenty-eight." After 
a pause he continued: "Do you know that yon- 
der mountain has a message for me and for the 
feeble folk who gather here for healing in its 
shadow .f^ It speaks of an existence where they 
measure not time in years. It speaks of a Realm 
whose King inhabiteth eternity and where cities 
have foundations that shall not pass away." 

He said no more and I made no reply. The 
rising moon now began to touch with golden light 
the rocky height, emphasizing with its light and 
shadow its rugged face as it scorned by its in- 
difference the ticking of the clock now clearly 
heard in the silence. Far above, too, one by one 
the stars in the sky depth blossomed out like the 
immemorial lamps of a city that abideth, and they 
mocked the twinkling lights that began to show 
along the streets of this man-made city of yester- 
day. 

We sat in silence, for words were inadequate. 

CHRISTMAS EVE 

December 2Jf, 

All day the snow had been falling; no breath 

of air has disturbed the stillness, so each feathery 

flake lies where it fell. As charity is said to 

cover a multitude of sins, so the snow mantle over 



148 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

meadow and hill hides from view many of earth's 
unsightly spots. 

To-night at the church they carried out the 
usual exercises of Christmas eve. A year ago her 
face, radiant and happy, shone among the others 
as the Star of Bethlehem long ago shone amid the 
lesser lights, but to-night that face was not there, 
and a shadow that we could not dispel was on us 
all. There was not a wreath or a festoon of holly 
on pulpit or altar rail which did not remind me of 
the skilKul hands which a year ago so deftly wove 
them; nor was there a song sung in which I did 
not hear the echoes of a pure and mellow voice. 
What can be lonelier than a crowded room from 
which one loved face is absent! It was a hollow 
pretense at merrymaking and at the first oppor- 
tunity I slipped away. 

Here, before the blazing grate, winter and fes- 
tivity both alike shut out, my thoughts travel 
back across the centuries, even as the wise men 
of old traveled across the deserts to the Shepherd 
Fields on the bleak Judean Hills. If I cannot 
with the wise men bring frankincense and myrrh 
to His manger cradle, I can, in thought, stand 
there and offer the homage of my reverence and 
my wonder. 

However we may differ as to the various theo- 
logical interpretations put upon the incident that 
Christmas commemorates, we must all agree that, 
measured by the results that have flown from it, 



CLEARING SKIES 149 

it is one of the most potent events in the world's 
long story. 

As my thoughts run back over those centuries 
that now are hushed into silence, as are the snow- 
covered hills around me, I realize that His life 
and words swayed and molded them. The 
noblest pictures, the sublimest music of the past 
are the product of genius inspired by the thought 
of his greatness. Mighty cathedrals, colossal 
gems of carved marble and granite, triumphs of 
both skill and art which are neither dwarfed nor 
dimmed by the greatest of modern achievements, 
were lifted by infinite labor and patience as a 
mark of devotion to him. Even the cross upon 
which he died, instrument of cruelty and despair 
fo the classic age, is transfigured into a symbol of 
tenderness and hope, and now, in forms of gold, 
adorns the neck of beauty, or, lifted on some lofty 
spire above the city's din and smoke, catches the 
morning's first gleam and holds the day's last 
lingering light. His words have been written into 
the laws of nations and his wishes have molded 
the hearts of millions. 

The hour that He first saw the light is a Green- 
wich in the midst of the years from which we cal- 
culate our position on the great sea of time. No 
order to an engineer to start his train is given, no 
paper is sent out from the press, no note is signed, 
no contract entered into, no bond issued, but 
that, in the date it carries, the time of the birth 



150 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of Christ is proclaimed. No nation declares war 
against another without, in the date of the pro- 
clamation, revealing the birth year of Him who 
came to bring peace on earth. No prize fight, no 
indecent play of the stage, no polluting exhibition 
can be advertised without, in the date giving the 
time of the performance, proclaiming that first 
Christmas when the angels sang of good will to 
men. No man in a dark room, his heart aflame 
with the passions that he shares with the beasts, 
his brain fired by the fumes of wine, planning to 
trip innocent and unwary feet, can but, in the 
date of the deceptive note he writes, proclaim 
the birth of Him who had the whitest soul of all 
the sons of men. 

His personality has permeated all our modern 
thought and institutions; His ideas and ideals, 
like golden strands, are inseparably woven into 
the fabric of life. 

To two bereaved sisters, as they stood by a 
newly made grave, he said, "He that liveth and 
believeth in me shall never die." These words 
become freighted with significance when we recall 
that they were spoken by One whose greatness is 
measured only by the imprint which his life has 
made upon the centuries. A new hope dimly rises 
in my heart that the scepter whose sway reaches 
across the increasing years reaches also into the 
great unseen. The last words that Vera spoke 
before the great silence fell upon her radiant spirit 



CLEARING SKIES 151 

were the words of the poet, which she made her 
own: "My Pilot face to face." To-night, I Hnk 
the thought of her with him, and some Hght from 
Bethlehem's star is shed around me and some 
sweet echoes of the angel chorus of the midnight 
sky come down across the centuries to relieve the 
loneliness of my Christmas eve. 

VANISHING ILLUSIONS 

Sunday Evening, January 2 If, 
The Elmwood valley was settled by people 
from Connecticut. They left the New England 
hills and traveled through the rich valley of the 
Mohawk, and the then thinly settled regions of 
central New York, on their way to the much 
talked of Genesee country lying in remote regions 
of the western wilderness. 

There are but few homes now in this community 
where some relic of that long journey is not cher- 
ished. It may be a yoke which some grandfather 
used on his team of oxen, or the heavy wheel or 
axle of a cart upon which was transported all his 
earthly goods. In some homes it is a garment of 
ancient fashion which some grandmother wore as 
a bridal dress on the honeymoon journey from 
the old home to a new one that was to be. These 
cherished reminders of early days vividly recall 
the struggle of the pioneers who faced the future 
with buoyant hearts. They were young, with the 
confidence and the optimism of youth, and, like 



15S THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

the children of Egypt to whose eyes the hot sand 
of the desert was endurable because a land of 
milk and honey lay beyond the shimmering waste, 
the way through the wilderness seemed short be- 
cause they painted to themselves at the end of the 
journey the farms they were to clear, growing yel- 
low for the harvest, and the hillsides where or- 
chards would bloom with pink and where boughs 
in autumn would bend with ripening fruit. 

But it is probable that not one dream that lit 
up the wilderness way to these young pioneers 
literally came true. They found hardship and sick- 
ness and a stubborn forest slow to yield to their tire- 
less labor. Toil bent the forms of their stalwart 
men and endless tasks of household routine faded 
the bloom from the cheeks of young womanhood. 
They saw not the harvest fields whiten as they 
had seen them in their dreams, nor had the com- 
fort and the plenty that they had hoped for ever 
been their lot. 

But if they did not find the things which beck- 
oned in their dreams, they found what was better. 
If in the battle that they fought they found not 
ripened fields upon which no mortgage rested, or 
orchards that the blight had not touched, they 
found strength of character, and faith, and in- 
tegrity of spirit, and immortal hope. If life 
had deceived by leading on with promises 
which had not been literally fulfilled, she is saved 
from being a willful deceiver by having given 



CLEARING SKIES 153 

something which was nobler and grander than 
had been promised. 

This is what Hfe ever does. The years never 
bring us quite what we thought they would, be- 
cause they bring us something better. History, 
in its broadest aspects, teaches that every future 
as it became a present has been deeper and truer 
in all of the great essentials than any dream of it 
anticipated. 

The young lad and maiden walk to the altar 
beneath an arch of blossoms, firmly believing that 
a flower-embowered path reaches on through sun- 
ny hours, endlessly, in a world of romance. But 
something in the dreams of lovers fades and fails. 
They walk on hand in hand, but the flowers lose 
something of their color and the sunshine some- 
thing of its brightness. But in the days that are 
gray and dark there is something of healing and 
the nights reveal stars which the daylight hid. 

Illusions vanish and reality is found in the places 
they make empty. The momentary regret over 
the shattered egg, as the shell lies broken on the 
path before us, is swept away by the music of the 
singing bird in the sky above us. I may dream 
of that other world, of its beauty and its music, 
and of seeing again her face and of clasping again 
her hands, and the dreams may, to me, be very 
real and very precious, but perhaps they will fade 
as fade all the dreams of earth; but if they do it 
will be only that they may make room for a 



154 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

diviner reunion, a nobler friendship and a more 
sublime life than have ever haunted my thoughts. 

A MARTYE'S BIRTHDAY 

February 12. 

The flag floating from the schoolhouse staff 
to-day reminded me that this is the anniversary 
of Lincoln's birth. It is now half a century since 
his brow was care-furrowed and his heart ached 
and his broad shoulders bent beneath the nation's 
burdens and sorrows which his love had made 
his own. He was one with the Northern mother 
waiting through long nights for footfalls that would 
never come; he was one with the Southern maiden 
waiting in vain through anxious days for some 
message from a soldier lover who had fallen amid 
the crash of battle, his last delirium illumined by 
the vision of her face. Through war's red years 
he carried his cross and drank at last the bitter 
cup to the dregs. He suffered much because he 
loved much, for love is capacity for pain. Yet his 
faith never faltered and with steady hand at the 
wheel he held the ship unswerving to its course. 

Like a mountain majestically towering above 
plain and foothills his character looms up above 
all the accidents of time and place as something 
belonging to the universal and the ageless. 

Some of the factors which enter into life have 
no relationship to time. They have had no 
cradle, they will have no grave. Mathematical 



CLEARING SKIES 155 

truths do not age with the years; we cannot 
think of any period of the past when they began, 
or of any period in the future when they will 
cease. That the shortest distance between two 
points is a straight line, is a truth which Euclid 
did not create, neither is it one that any future 
iconoclast will destroy. The great principles of 
art and music were not created by Phidias or by 
Beethoven, any more than America was created 
by Columbus. We are not indebted to Confucius 
or to Moses or to Seneca for the moral signifi- 
cance of honesty and purity and love; at best 
these ethical teachers but vocalized in time time- 
less factors. 

Lincoln was too human to be anything more than 
imperfect. The crude limitations of his early 
years were such that he never wholly rose above 
them. Many harpstrings, which in other lives 
make rich music as they echo responsively to the 
melody and beauty of the world, were in his 
strangely silent. But in all the great essentials, 
he incorporated into his character the timeless 
factors. His thought conformed to the mold of 
ageless truth and his spirit bore the image and 
the superscription of the eternal. He reeled 
from ageless spindles the threads that made the 
warp of his life, into whose determining lines he 
wove with unerring skill the patterns of the tem- 
poral. He held up his cup and the heavens filled 
it; he walked a way shrouded in darkness, but his 



156 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

steps were guided by the light of the stars. In 
the midst of things temporal he lived the life that 
is eternal. 

On that dark and rainy morning of the 15 th of 
April, ^65, the silence that had fallen on the 
watchers grouped about the bed where the now 
motionless form of Lincoln lay, was broken by his 
secretary: "Now he belongs to the ages." He 
belonged to the ages when dead, because when 
living he lived the ageless life. The instincts of 
the people found inevitable expression when, on 
Easter Sunday, two days after his death, men 
crowded the churches of the land, and, throwing 
tradition and conventional theology both alike to 
the winds, demanded from the sacred desk assur- 
ance that somewhere the great leader still lived. 
Anything seemed possible save that out in the 
mystery there was no path for his patient feet, no 
crown for his kingly head. 

I know that Vera lives in eternity, for even in 
time she lived the eternal life. In the midst of the 
changing and the perishing her supreme interests 
were centered in the immutable and the abiding 
things of beauty and music and truth and love. 
They over-arched her path like a sky, and imaged 
themselves in her spirit as the stars are imaged in 
the smooth waters of the little river. She grew 
by clinging to the ageless as the woodbine climbs 
upward toward the sunshine by clinging to the 
oak and the rock. 



CLEARING SKIES 157 

THE FUTURE THAT NOW IS 

Sunday Evening, February 22. 

An endless panorama of scenes has flitted 
across my mind in the year that has just passed, but 
they have been erased as a child erases the pic- 
tures from his slate; but all the details of that black 
day in May are etched in memory, never to be 
effaced. The father, that afternoon, told Vera, in 
reply to her troubled questions, that in that far 
country there would be a little river winding 
its way through wooded places, whose smooth 
stretches would catch, morning and evening, the 
day's sunrise and sunset glow; that the thrushes 
would sing there at twilight, but they would sing 
a sweeter song; and that along her path would 
bloom the flowers that she loved, only in that 
yonder land the bloom would be brighter than 
any flowers of earthly fields. 

It was a parent's resourceful love meeting in a 
supreme hour a child's deep need; but may not 
the father's words carry a deeper and a wider 
meaning than we might at first be willing to give 
them? The present and the future are not cleft 
asunder by any unbridgeable gulf. Time may be a 
landlocked harbor, but it feels the pulse and the 
heave of the tides of eternity. The years are a part 
of the circle whose infinite sweep encompasses the 
timeless, and some of the elements of that mighty 
curve are to be found in even so short a segment 
as Vera's twenty radiant years of life would make. 



158 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

The little dewdrop sparkling on the petals of 
a rose catches something of the sunset's reflected 
glory, even as the shoreless sea does. The finite 
can hold something of the infinite; eternity can 
reflect something of itseK in time. "The hour 
Cometh and now is," are the words of a great 
Teacher as he emphasized the existence in the 
present of factors which would find their full 
expression in the future. 

Two years ago I went with Vera to New York 
when she started on her trip across the sea. As her 
ship sailed away, I watched it grow smaller and 
smaller until its outline became indistinct in the 
mist that hung along the horizon; then it dropped 
below the ocean's rim and was lost to sight. To 
me, in thought, that point seemed a break in the 
journey, but I knew that to her the voyage was 
uninterrupted. The ocean still stretched before 
the prow, the billows rising and falling away to 
the horizon, while overhead the blue sky dome 
arched her way. That which seemed a change to 
those on shore marked no change to her. 

I love to think that Vera's longer journey was 
an unbroken one; that what was death to us was 
to her a fresh and wondrous experience amid con- 
ditions not wholly new. I love to believe that the 
thick mist and darkness that blotted out to our 
eyes her craft as she sailed away, was mist and 
darkness only from the point from which we 
looked; to her the sky was blue above and the 



CLEARING SKIES 159 

sunshine sparkling and glinting on the water be- 
fore her. 

The mountain path may reveal at every turn, 
as it ascends, a wider horizon and a grander view, 
yet the path from the valley to the height be an 
unbroken one. 

There are some things in this world that do not 
age; upon them the passing years leave no mark 
of time. They are young with an eternal youth. 
There are pictures in the galleries which we may 
have seen a hundred or a thousand times, but we 
do not grow weary of them; there are songs 
which we have heard from childhood, but their 
music has lost none of its power to charm our ear 
or to touch our hearts. No one lives so long 
among the mountams that he tires of that twi- 
light hour when the low-lying clouds are fringed 
with fire and the splintered peaks glow like bur- 
nished gold as the day's last glory fades. There is 
many a cool spring on earth, the beaten path to 
which we never grow weary of traveling. 

I love to cherish the thought that Vera, in that 
new world of experience, found some of the cher- 
ished things of earth still unchanged, save as they 
were lifted and transfigured into a nobler use and 
meaning and into a sublimer and diviner beauty. 
As Millet took some commonplace landscape, 
with its broken fences and dust-bedraggled weeds 
and sordid cabin homes, and with his brush of 
genius changed it to a masterpiece of form and 



160 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

color; or as Shakespeare took some simple tale, 
told by stammering lips about a village hearth, 
and poured into it such a wealth of passion and 
pathos and suggestion that it became a drama of 
unequaled human interest; or as Mozart picked 
up at the little store a violin whose slackened 
strings had but squeaked and shrieked in clumsy 
hands, and with his master touch brought 
forth the tender melody of his "Requiem," so 
perhaps does the future change and lift and 
transfigure many of the familiar and precious 
things of the present. 

May I not believe that before Vera's eyes hills 
not wholly unfamiliar swell into more graceful 
outlines, and well-known meadow scenes stretch 
away in tints of fresher and diviner green? The 
bird symphony thrills with nobler harmony to 
her ears, but far echoes of its sweetness she caught 
at twilight in many an Elmwood thrush's song. 
I doubt not that amid the flowers that bloom on 
the edges of crystal streams or on the green slopes 
of the mountains of life, she rejoices in their per- 
fect beauty and meaning; yet in many a blossom 
that decks the banks of the little river she vaguely 
caught some glimmerings of it all, but so vaguely 
that the beauty was too subtile for words and the 
meaning lay too deep for tears. 

I love to think that in the fair architecture of 
that wondrous city that meets her admiring gaze 
she sees some familiar lines of grace and power 




THE OATKA 



CLEARING SKIES 161 

that cling to earthly towers and temples, even 
though there they swell out in a freedom and per- 
fection which Angelo vainly strove to reproduce 
in earth's unyielding stone. If the notes of her 
violin are soft and sweet beyond the power of 
earthly language to express, there is something 
in its melody which haunted her in her dreams 
the night she played in the moonlight when the 
orchards were in bloom, even though the strings 
of her instrument then were too coarse to trans- 
late it into sound. 

I love to believe that the finest, and the truest, 
and the noblest things of earth are the dawn tints 
of the eternal day. 

A LONG ROAD 

Sunday Evening , March 1. 
It was a long and weary way that nature trav- 
eled from the wild, useless weed that grew in 
waste and stony places on the bleak hills of west- 
ern Asia, to the stems of modern wheat with 
their golden heads bending beneath the weight of 
flour-filled kernels. It is a wondrous evolution 
that changes, step by step through the centuries, 
the loathsome reptile croaking in the mud of 
primeval jungles, to the nightingale balancing in 
the air on graceful wings and pouring out a song 
so sweet that even critical ears are charmed. 
Many changes took place in man's methods and 
ideals of building from the time he first con- 



162 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

structed with poles and skins his dweUing until 
he lifted the many-spired cathedral to the clouds. 
It is a long journey across the years from the 
savage's monotonous but rhythmic beating of the 
tom-tom to the modern orchestral rendering of an 
oratorio, or from the rude outline picture, sketched 
on the bone of a mammoth by the cave man, to the 
triumph of form and color in a Corot or an Inness. 

But evolution in the world of nature or of art 
does not reveal more remarkable changes in the 
line of growth than are often shown in the develop- 
ment of an idea. Words which at the beginning 
held but the germ of a thought, grow through the 
years until they are deep with feeling and broad 
with meaning. The word "god" has changed in 
meaning from the time when the idea for which it 
stood could be associated with a cat, or a hawk, or 
a snake, or a bull, to the time when, to sensitive 
souls, it is so suggestive of the ineffable in power 
and purity and love, that they are stilled to rever- 
ence by its sound. Simple ideas, which first 
gleamed as rush fires, burning along earth's ho- 
rizons, arose in the firmament to become fixed stars 
to guide and illumine men along uncharted ways. 
The torches that fitfully flickered in men's hands 
became blazing suns in the heavens. 

Wondrous have been the changes in the grow- 
ing significance of the words which have been 
used through the centuries to express the user's 
thought of the future life. From the Valhalla of 



CLEARING SKIES 163 

the Northmen, which in the dreams of the fierce 
warriors was a place where the victorious drank 
mead from the skulls of the battle's slain, it is a 
far cry to the Paradise of Dante. Thought trav- 
eled far from the Greek conception of a shadowy 
realm where the spirits of the departed squeaked 
and chattered in their impotency and gloom, to 
the visions of the church-men who saw it as a 
place of splendor and triumph and worship. A 
wide gulf was crossed when thought passed from 
the Moslem conception of the future as a great 
harem, degraded by the grossest associations of 
earth, to the future that Vera dreamed of as a 
place whose beauty earth's rarest flowers but 
dimly hinted of, and whose love the friendships 
of time but vaguely suggested. 

Century by century the idea has passed through 
successive phases, ever growing fuller and richer, 
like the bud of an opening rose as it reaches 
toward the blossom; slowly has it freed itself from 
gross and earthly associations as it has risen above 
them, like a full-orbed moon slowly rising above 
mist and cloud that dims and obscures it until in 
a clearer sky it shines in its stainless beauty. It 
looms up more and more as an experience to be 
interpreted in terms suggested by the noblest 
hours of life; an experience where the ideals of 
earth still beckon, but from heights not so unat- 
tainable; and where the noblest impulses of our 
hearts, like eagles escaped from their cages, try 



164 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

their pinions in the blue. It is the realization of 
the highest and the holiest that haunt us in our 
divinest moments. 

But the song of that great life must ever be a 
song without words, for no language of the lips 
can translate that prophetic music which, in our 
great and holy hours, sings in our hearts. We 
await the evolution of an eternity to reveal to us 
the final meaning of the word Heaven. 

THE LAMP OF PERSONALITY 

Sunday Evening, March 8. 
We never know the real and vital meaning of 
any moral quality or spiritual truth until it is 
translated to us through a personality. It must 
become flesh and dwell among us before we can 
behold its glory. It is not by listening to sermons 
or in reading essays on ethics that we catch the 
truest vision of courage, but by coming close to 
a Leonidas or a Putnam of the past. One does not 
learn what patriotism is from Fourth of July ora- 
tions, or from the passing splendor of the gilt and 
lace of a martial pageant, but from the troubled 
but determined face of Washington at Valley 
Forge, or from the haggard, sorrow-lined face of 
Lincoln after Fredericksburg. How large must be 
the volume whose definitions and descriptions of 
graciousness would convey half the meaning which 
is conveyed to us in a flash by the bow and greet- 
ings of a gracious woman! We know what purity 



CLEARING SKIES 165 

is only when we read its meaning in the clear 
eyes and frank face of innocent girlhood, and we 
know what love is only when it is translated to us 
from the bent form and care-lined face of a true 
mother. When God would unveil something of 
his heart to the world, he did it through the per- 
sonality of a humble and lonely man. Lives 
have ever been the light of men. Great per- 
sonalities have ever been the embodiment and the 
translation of those truths that have become the 
living articles in the creed of mankind. 

Some grasp and appreciation of this fact is 
revealed in the almost universal custom of monu- 
ment building. Some individual whose life has 
been as a lamp shedding light on the darkened 
ways of men sinks into the long sleep; his person- 
ality has been a factor too valuable to be lost, so 
they carve his face in marble and mold his form 
in bronze and pile granite tier on tier and cut his 
name in the capstone. By mere physical repre- 
sentations they strive to keep him still among 
them. Hence, Rome had her arches and Appian 
Way, and Paris has her Pantheon, and England 
has her Westminster Abbey, and America has her 
shrines at Monticello and at Mount Vernon and 
at Springfield and at Canton. 

The belief in the immortality of the soul was 
born in human hearts at the bedside of the dying. 
Arguments did not bring the conviction, argu- 
ments were devised only to justify it. The con- 



166 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

viction did not arise out of man's selfishness, it 
was flashed upon him by the recognized worth of 
the life of another. I knew Vera Meldrum and 
now I cannot think a spirit back to dust. I am 
familiar with all the arguments upon which the 
belief is supposed to rest and I have fondly cher- 
ished them, for they are not without value; and 
yet it is not science's revelations of the persis- 
tence of force, it is not the butterfly flitting above 
the shattered cocoon, it is not the lily blooming 
above the mold and decay of last year's perished 
growth, it is not wild wings in the boundless sky 
finding their certain way that brings conviction, 
but the light and the revelation of a life. 

Vera's gentle and joyous spirit has shed a new 
meaning on life as we know it here. When she 
passed the darkened portal into the unknown the 
lamp of her personality was not extinguished and, 
for me, she lights up the untraveled ways and 
illuminates the chambers of eternity. 

EASTER'S MESSAGE 

Sunday Evening, March 29. 
At the close of our medical course six of us of 
the graduating class spent a few weeks of tramp- 
ing and camping in the wildest and most pictur- 
esque regions of the Rockies. We hired as our 
guide a man of middle age who from childhood 
had been familiar with this mountain section. 
The first sight his baby eyes beheld was the great 



CLEARING SKIES 167 

towering ranges whose pine-clad sides sloped up 
into the plateaus and peaks of naked rock where, 
through all the year, the snow lay in its virgin 
whiteness. All the years of his boyhood and man- 
hood had been spent in the shadows of the sky- 
shouldering hills. But during the time that he 
was with us I think he never saw the purple light 
along the heights at daybreak, or saw the sunrise 
rays turn the icy peaks to gold. I think he never 
saw the crimson of the western sky at evening 
touch with reflected light the snow fields to pink, 
or turn the mountain streams to blood. He knew 
every trail, he enjoyed the fire when the air grew 
chill, and with the keenest relish he partook of 
the rudely prepared meals; but beyond these in- 
terests his thoughts did not seem to pass. When 
he lay down in his blankets he immediately fell 
to sleep, while we, breathing the fresh air laden 
with the odor of hemlock and pine, lay awake 
half the night looking at the stars burning so bril- 
liantly in the black blue sky dome above us, or 
watching the edges of the splintered crags change 
from silver to gold as the moon slowly came up 
behind them. 

I attended the Easter services to-day at the 
church, and for the first time the real beauty and 
significance of the Easter symbols and the Easter 
thought came to me. As a boy I had taken part 
in similar programs, and in all my life I have 
missed but two or three times the pleasure of 



168 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

attending these annual exercises. But in my 
thought it was associated with the opening buds 
and brighter ribbons and happy music and, per- 
haps above all else, with the return of spring 
which, in this northern climate, is so welcome 
after the long months of frost and snow. As 
in the case of the mountain guide, familiarity 
had blinded me to its deep and beautiful mean- 
ing. 

The children to-day with happy faces carried 
the colored eggs and the painted butterfly and 
the bouquets of lilies through the tableaus, and 
used them in their recitations and songs, as wholly 
unconscious, I imagine, as I was at their age, of 
the beauty of the thought of which these things 
were but symbols. 

The egg is but a temporary form of life, a tran- 
sitory stage of existence, above whose broken shell 
life shall still wing its way victoriously. The but- 
terfly is old life in a new form, now made free, 
and leaving the narrow prison limitations of co- 
coon days behind. What symbol could be more 
eloquent of the triumph of life over the waste and 
decay wrought by death than the lily blooming 
in its fresh luscious beauty above the dried stems 
and faded petals and withered leaves of last sea- 
son's ruin.f^ 

Though living in a world of change where 
"Passing away" is written on all he sees, man has 
often vaguely, but always persistently, hoped for 



CLEARING SKIES 169 

a survival of himself, in some form, beyond the 
waste of death. 

Sometimes he has gloried in the thought that 
he could defeat the destroying hand of time by 
surviving in the lives of his children and his chil- 
dren's children down across the years to distant 
generations. This idea has given stability and 
preciousness to the family institution and sanc- 
tity to the family name, but it is a form of immor- 
tality that does not meet the deepest of the heart's 
needs. It does not give promise of our personal 
continuance nor offer anything to that more un- 
selfish hope which we cherish for the persistence 
of the personalities of those whom we have learned 
to love. The family line and the family name may 
persist through the generations, but if the indi- 
vidual members turn back to unconscious dust, 
the deepest need of our affectional life remains 
unsatisfied. 

Man too has tried to find satisfaction in the 
thought that even though he should sleep a dream- 
less sleep after life's fitful fever, still it would be 
possible for him to live on in the memories of the 
men and women who were to follow. To gain 
the immortality of fame men have burned the 
midnight oil until their lives flickered out with 
their lamps, or have pursued the phantom into 
the flame and smoke at the cannon's mouth. But 
this is a deceptive and futile hope. We may 
linger a little while in the cherished memories of 



170 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

some small circle that knows us well and loves 
us best, but even they, at last, may forget. From 
the consciousness of the great busy world we will 
fade as quickly as fade from our thought at day- 
break the multitude of faces and forms that people 
our dreams. The dance goes on, the lights flash 
upon the stage, the crowds throng the places of 
gain and power as careless of the loss of one of 
their members as is the sea that heedless and un- 
concerned rolls in rippling waves over the spot 
where fiive minutes before some craft went 
down. 

It is a noble hope, but a not less futile one, 
when men seek immortality in an undying in- 
fluence that they hope may stream from the words 
or works they leave behind. The oak in its pride 
bows at last to the storm and out of the richer soil 
which its decay has helped to make there will be, 
through the coming years, a greener and a fresher 
world. Dynasties of animal life whose history is 
recorded in the fossils of the rocks gained through 
the centuries some increment of vantage in keen- 
ness of sight, or quickness of movement, or grace 
of form, which was, as they perished, passed on as 
a rich and permanent legacy to their successors. 
It is a noble dream when a man hopes to join the 
"choir invisible" and by the burning thought 
which he fuses into words, or by the gem of truth 
which he has digged from deep and difficult mines, 
or by the music which he has caught from river 



CLEARING SKIES 171 

or star, helps to make life for all that come after 
him a sweeter and happier and larger thing. Da 
Vinci painted his masterpiece on the stone walls 
of the church at Milan that on this permanent 
background it would abide for the enjoyment and 
inspiration of generations still to be. The sculp- 
tor turns night into day as he cuts the stone into 
swelling lines of grace and truth, and the musician 
transposes his life into his song, that they may 
please and thrill eyes and ears of many yet un- 
born. 

But this, too, is an empty dream. The walls 
that Da Vinci thought permanent have settled 
and cracked. The heat of Italian summers has 
robbed his paintings of most of their beauty, and 
time's changed viewpoint has robbed them of all 
their significance. The statue over which genius 
labored and dreamed is corroded and broken, and 
the song which the singer thought immortal has 
been forgotten. 

A few names and a few deeds, it is true, survive 
and will safely float down across the flood into 
whose black depths so much goes down. But even 
these too will end. Science tells us that slowly 
but surely our earth will run its course through 
fixed stages to an inevitable fate. Rivers will 
shrink to rivulets, and streams will evaporate 
leaving only a rock-paved channel to tell where 
once the waters laughed. Vegetation will grow 
less and less as the sun burns down like a candle 



172 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

in its socket. The race will slowly perish in the 
conflict for bread, until the last man roams the 
barren fields with no companions. He will lie un- 
buried where he falls and on his white scared face 
the sun will shine by day with a faint and fitful 
light, and at night, over him unseen, the moon, a 
dim coppery disc, will sweep on among the stars 
that now burn with unwonted brilliancy. A silent 
world, its music ended, its pictures destroyed, its 
cathedrals in ruins, its cities but heaps of stone, 
will sweep on in its meaningless course into the 
darkness of an ever-deepening night. 

The man who lives and dies merely to lift up 
and make nobler an earthly regime, lives and dies 
for something which, too, will die. Even though 
a silver thread of influence is unreeled to be woven 
into the fabric of the future, or a noble note is 
uttered the mellow echo of which will sound far 
down the years, they both must end; for at last 
the fabric of which the thread is a part will be 
destroyed and there will be no hearts nor ears to 
be thrilled by the music's sweetness. 

Vera's name remains a cherished possession in 
these Valley homes; her memory lingers like 
music after the song has ended, like melody from 
harp strings that the player's fingers have ceased 
to touch. The influence of her life, too, lingers, 
a sweet and potent force. But Easter speaks, 
not of the survival of fame or of influence, but of 
the continuity and triumph of life. A deep and 



CLEARING SKIES 173 

secret joy floods my heart today because of its 
promise that a radiant spirit Hves. 

RAIN UPON THE ROOF 

Sunday Evening, April 12. 
Columbus was looking for India when he found 
America. The story of many discoveries is the 
story of the finding of things for which the dis- 
coverers were not searching. I went this after- 
noon to the attic to get a saddle stirrup, and, in 
the fruitless seeking, I came upon a box of child- 
hood relics which I had not seen for years. The 
warm spring rain was coming steadily down, and 
whether it was the desire to listen to its music as 
it beat upon the shingles just above my head, or 
whether it was a lost childhood casting over me 
a subtile spell, I cannot say, but for an hour or 
more I remained and looked over these remnants 
of the past. Here were the skates whose steel 
runners, still untarnished, brought back the thrill 
of those days when gliding over the glary surface 
of the newly frozen river I knew the swallow's 
ecstasy of flight. Here, too, was a top with the 
red string by which I spun it still intact. Here were 
a dozen or more of marbles shading in color from 
green and blue to the glossy soft brown which to- 
day, as of old, suggested the brown eyes of honest 
Carlo, who long ago passed into the great silence 
with the squirrels and chipmunks that together 
we used to chase. Here, too, was the autograph 



174 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

album with its black leather binding and its 
flower-decorated pages. Laboriously written and 
at all angles were the names of Zenol, and Harriet, 
and Ethel, and Mabel, and on one time-yellowed 
page, in a clear and delicate childish hand as frank 
and as modest as the spirit that looked through 
these remembered childhood eyes, was Vera's 
name. 

As Schliemann may have stood in some old 
Trojan palace which his spade had uncovered but 
which the onmoving world had wholly forgotten, 
and seeing the polished marble floor of the dancing 
courts and the yet brilliant frescoes of the ban- 
quet hall, mused on the joy and the laughter that 
had echoed here when goblets had sparkled to the 
brim and music had throbbed in languid, pas- 
sionate strains while tripping over the worn tilings 
light-sandaled feet beat out the gayety of lighter 
hearts, so with the rain upon the roof, I sat amid 
the reminders of a period that is now long past 
and mused on its activities and its joys which 
once filled, even to the brim, the cup of my life. 
These books and skates and marbles and sled 
once made my world and beyond the horizon of 
that realm neither wish nor thought traveled. 
But the ship sailed on and the continent which 
held childhood's interests sank below the horizon 
line behind, unmissed and unlamented; youth's 
eager eyes were now fixed on the sun-illumined 
slopes of a new world of experience that slowly 



CLEARING SKIES 175 

but beautifully rose above the horizon-line in 
front. It is not difficult to lay aside childish things. 
The fresh interests of an ever new experience 
crowd the old ones to the wings as they move to 
take their places in the center of the stage. 

Two years ago, as the commencement time at 
the old college approached, I anticipated with 
keenest enjoyment the pleasure of returning to 
the old loved places. Yet, once there, I realized 
with the keenest pain that while one may go back 
to the places of his youth he cannot go back to his 
youth. Everything was unchanged, apparently, ex- 
cept myself. The buildings were the same, the 
lecture rooms were as of old, even the chairs I used 
to occupy were still sitting in the old places; the 
gravel walks lay in their familiar curves in the cool 
and shaded places, and the river, knowing no touch 
of time, swept in broad smooth stretches on its way 
to the sea. At the annual game with our old 
rivals there were the same spontaneous and exu- 
berant manifestations of young life, and the old 
songs were sung with the old happy, boisterous 
spirit. The same dull roar of applause ran along 
the crowded bleachers as if the tossing sea of blue 
and crimson pennants was breaking on invisible 
shores into sound. But with something of sur- 
prise I realized that college life, whose friendships 
and class rivalries and games and victories once 
filled my brain and heart, did not now occupy 
the same supreme and exclusive place. The rival- 



176 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

ries did not seem so crucial, and social distinctions 
did not seem so important, and the victories of 
the athletic field did not have the cosmic signifi- 
cance that once they had. Other interests, other 
rivalries, other goals, belonging to a wholly different 
sphere of experience because belonging to a wholly 
different period of life, had entered and the for- 
mer life and its interests were crowded from the 
stage's center. 

I know that that world of childhood which the 
autograph of Vera in the faded volume suggests 
was wholly crowded out of her real life as the 
larger horizons of youth dawned upon her active 
spirit. I know that as the awakening years came 
on her ardent interest in the beauty and the music 
and service of life crowded this little childhood 
world of thought more and more into a forgotten 
past. Must it be that now, living in new spheres 
of activity, under conditions strange and won- 
drous, the old world of Elmwood life, its birds and 
flowers and friends, not unwillingly or regretfully, 
has been crowded out of her thought.^ 

Yet even though the larger and sterner duties 
of manhood crowded out of memory childhood's 
days, there are hours when the odor of a rose, the 
call of the bluebird in March, the blossoming dog- 
woods, may send thought not unwillingly back to 
boy land, where joyously it revels awhile beneath 
skies of memory that are always blue and among 
the flowers that the years do not fade. In a wake- 



CLEARING SKIES 177 

ful hour at commencement the old college clock 
struck three, and the familiar notes started a thou- 
sand associations. Every bellnote was as the call 
of the last trumpet in the burial place of memory ; 
obedient to its summons a thousand incidents 
came forth from the long undisturbed grave of 
forgetfulness and the mind was thronged with the 
images of a happy past. Over the mellow waves 
of sound that trembled along the darkened shores 
of silence I sailed to many a sunny isle of recol- 
lection, and mingled with joyous groups and 
greeted with familiar freedom loved but forgot- 
ten faces. 

Even though Vera walks the wondrous path of 
what to us is an unimagined existence, and though 
her spirit is thrilled with the ecstasy of life of 
which our clay-vestured souls can know no hint, 
may it not be at times that some gleam from 
eternal things, some tint of color on the crystal 
sea, some sweet familiar fragrance distilled from 
the bloom on evergreen hills, some note of blended 
melody from celestial harps, unlatches the gate 
that opens into the fields of a happy past.^^ May 
it not be that at times she, not unwillingly, hastens 
along the way that runs backward across sunny 
slopes to spend a reminiscent moment amid old 
scenes where joy once filled, even to the brim, the 
cup of a happy youth? 

It was a wide chasm that separated the poverty 
and the obscurity of Lincoln's early years from 



178 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

the later days of honor and power when he carried 
upon his heart a nation's sorrow; yet, in the hour 
when his thought was most absorbed in great 
enterprises and the praises of men were loudest in 
his ears, some trivial incident would send his 
thought back to the Kentucky cabin, or to the 
lonely home on the prairies, as he kindly recalled 
some incident or some companion of a humble and 
sordid past. 

And I am happy in the thought that even in 
her gladdest hours some longing look on the faces 
of her happy mates, some gleam from the sparkling 
eyes of those that mingle in circles of love, may 
bring to her a momentary sense of something 
wanting, and send her thought back to faces that 
now to her are lost, but not wholly forgotten. 

A BOW OF EARTH AND SKY 

Sunday Evening, April 19. 
For an hour or more this afternoon a warm 
shower drenched the fields and woods, washing 
the air free from dust and giving to every leaf a 
fresher green and to every blossom a more radiant 
glow. When the strength of the shower was past 
and the breaking clouds, through gold-edged open- 
ings, began to reveal patches of the bluest of blue 
skies, a rainbow with a majestic curve swept from 
hill to hill across the valley. The great arch of 
color dwarfed the oaks and elms by the river and 
roadways, and the tall maples in the cemetery. 



^^P^^^B|mn3PH|^ '#/ >i^^, "^^ 




" ;' '^"'"jjJimi^^^^^^^^^^B 








^m^"^-- 



SUNLIGHT 



CLEARING SKIES 179 

as its graceful reaches spanned the homes of the 
living and the graves of the dead. It was a bril- 
liant and a gratuitous expression of beauty. 

The attempt has been made to explain the 
beautiful in terms of the useful, thus not only 
degrading the fairest and queenliest daughter of 
the house to the position of a menial, but casting 
doubt upon the nobleness of her lineage; the 
theory fails at too many points to shake one's 
confidence in her imperial ancestry. 

If beauty in nature serves a useful purpose, it 
does so as the attic of a princely mansion does; 
the attic may be almost indispensably convenient, 
but its existence is a purely incidental result of 
structural lines which the architect had planned 
from the beginning. Even if the colors of a blos- 
som attract the bee with her fertilizing pollen, 
this is but incidental; it offers no explanation of 
the petal's delicate shadings through a score of 
tints, or of the symmetrical arrangement of the 
dots about the corolla, or the graceful arching lines 
of the stamens. If color in bird-life plays a part 
in nature's mysterious laws of evolution, that is 
not even a beginning of an explanation of the deli- 
cate filaments and exquisite markings of even a 
single feather. Utility does not explain the whorl 
of a shell lying forty fathoms deep in ocean ooze 
or the tender grace of the edelweiss blooming 
alone on Alpine heights. The mirrored loveliness 
of forest and clouds in a mountain lake, the play 



180 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of colors in a sunset sky, the innumerable tints of 
autumn, the purple light that hangs over distant 
hills, are not to be reduced to the level of mere 
utilities. 

Beauty in nature is but the outward expression 
of a dominant tendency deep at the heart of crea- 
tive energy. God never touched the earth that 
the print of his finger was not in lines of grace and 
beauty. 

Nature's glory of curve and color is but the out- 
ward expression of a beauty -passion that lies 
deep at the heart of the Eternal, even as the rip- 
pling song of the lark above sunny fields, or the 
happy laughter of a child is the overflow of an 
inner cup of gladness. 

In that last hour when Vera was trying to bring 
comfort to the stricken hearts about her, she said: 
"Beauty crowded along every path of woods or 
meadow that, here, I walked; yonder, it will deck 
the untraveled ways." That which so dominates 
the realm of time must cross the threshold of the 
unseen and find a grander and a nobler expression 
in the realm of the eternal. To-day, as the great 
arch of radiant colors bent above the fields she 
loved and above the grave where she sleeps, its 
base on earth and its curve in the highest heavens, 
it seemed a mute and mystic confirmation of her 
words and of her hopes. 



CLEARING SKIES 181 

THE ASCENDING PATH 

Sunday Evening, April 26, 
Late this afternoon I stood in the Kttle ceme- 
tery at the spot where almost a year ago we laid 
Vera away. The air was soft and warm; on every 
hand the foliage was reaching up to a fuller ex- 
pression of life in color and form, the buds were 
opening into blossoms and the birds were singing 
their mating songs of love and happiness. But 
upon the stone that marks her sleeping place was, 
"At Rest." The thought which the words sug- 
gested was so out of harmony with the exultant 
and exuberant manifestations of life around me, 
that they seemed as cruel as they were false. It 
is a conventional term found on half the stones 
of this little acre, but we deceive ourselves when 
we use it and do injustice in our thought to the 
loved whom we have lost. 

Perhaps there are some to whom life has been 
a long journey over a hot and dusty way, who 
look ahead with gladness to the grave as a place 
of rest where tired arms and aching backs can lay 
aside at last the weary burden. Life is never less 
than a serious thing for all, but to some it is so 
tragic that it is with unfeigned joy that they look 
forward to a long and undisturbed sleep where 
unhappy memories will no longer haunt and 
where all the stinging gnats of harassed hours are 
still; where hearts of dust will no longer ache or 



18g THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

break and where eyes of ashes will not shed the 
bitter tear. Some, weary of erring, weary of vain 
hoping, sated with bootless experience, cry out 
with the Scotch pessimist for "the restful rapture 
of the inviolate grave." 

But even for those who do not share moods so 
dark, the idea of rest, as applying to the future, 
is all too common. Perhaps the dim and shaded 
light of churches, or the quietness of the cemetery 
where we walk softly and speak in low tones, or 
the cold stillness of our dead as we see them for 
the last time, in our thought, creeps across the 
threshold of the future and colors our mental pic- 
tures of the great beyond. We do not easily free 
ourselves from the impression that the eternal 
world is cast in forms of finality. The goal is 
reached and the winner rests; the battle is fought 
and the warrior puts aside the sword and armor. 
The stream tumbling noisily from ledge to ledge 
or eddying in many a bend and cove, or laughing 
as it sweeps on between winding shores, glides at 
last into the calm waters of the inland lake whose 
unruffled surface catches the blue sky's perfect 
image. 

This is not to describe, but to malign, the nature 
of the great yonder existence. W^hy should we 
think of the future save in terms of life? and life 
means activity and change and growth. It means 
a movement forever on and upward to finer and 
larger destinies. 



CLEARING SKIES 183 

There is nothing in human experience to justify 
the idea of finahty. There is nothing final in 
nature, or in history, or in personahty. 

Sometimes as we stand beneath the stars we 
are impressed with the idea of the permanent, 
the changeless. The same constellations, appar- 
ently, shine down on us as shone down on the 
ancient Homer as he walked beneath the stars, 
catching inspiration from the night; or as gleamed 
above Egypt when the first Pharaoh meditated on 
his plans for a pyramid. The Pleiades were yon- 
der, "fireflies in a tangled braid," the Dipper 
wheeled its course about the pole, and the gems 
in the belt of Orion gleamed as now when the clay 
out of which the walls of Babylon were builded 
lay undisturbed in the mud flats of the Euphrates, 
or when the cave-man fought the mammoth in 
the snows and rigors of the age of ice. But 
science is telling us that fixed stars are not fixed, 
and that the constellations are disintegrating. 
The bowl of the Dipper will be broken, the Great 
Bear will be torn limb from limb, Orion will be 
dismembered and the fireflies of the Pleiades will 
scatter to the various ways. 

In the long story of the race how many and how 
vain have been the attempts to give forms of 
finality to human thought and human institu- 
tions. Cherish as we may traditions and estab- 
lished orders, the spirit of life sooner or later 
sweeps on to find expression in new manifesta- 



184 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

tions, leaving the older forms behind as but relics 
or monuments of an epoch that has closed. 

We speak of personality as a fixed factor of 
experience; this is but a half truth that may de- 
ceive more than a full-faced falsehood. What 
abides of our personality, unchanged through the 
years, is a strand so attenuated that it is almost 
a neghgible factor in the fabric of life. How 
much of the crude boy of ten, selfish, thoughtless, 
headstrong, remains in the genial sacrificing man 
of fifty .f^ How much of the girl of twelve, who 
tries to force the world to move about her as a 
center and is unendurable when she does not 
wholly succeed, is left when, twenty years later, 
love has made her heart his home and around a 
group of little lives her every thought and hope 
moves in tireless orbits.^ 

In our experience in the mental world within, 
or in the physical world without, finality in any 
form does not meet us. We find life, and life 
means change and growth. Why do we allow the 
hush and stillness of our death chambers to settle 
down like a pall on our mental conceptions of the 
future! Why do we allow the cold and palsied 
hand of death to reach beyond the curtain to 
touch with inertness and silence the great beyond ! 

As I stood in the gloaming hour to-day, leaf 
and bud on every hand were opening into a new 
and fresh existence. The warm air was full of 
buzzing forms of minutest life, eddying in the 



CLEARING SKIES 185 

dizzy mazes of a sunbeam dance. As I watched 
the play of the sunset colors changing from tint 
to tint through shades too subtle in their delicacy 
to describe, and too rapidly for the eye to mark, 
it seemed as if the whole western sky was a great 
mirror where I caught some fleeting image of the 
aspiring restlessness of infinite energy and life. 

When I thought of Vera, whose spirit turned in 
every experience to light and to hope as the blos- 
som turns, through bright and shadowed hours, to 
the sun; who found God in life, not in death, and 
who found the wonder of existence in the noon- 
tide's brightness and not in the sun's eclipse, I 
felt that the falsest note in the landscape was in 
those words, "At Rest," above the sward where 
we laid her. 

I recall a time when dolls and marbles and tops 
marked the horizon line of her interests; as the 
bright, glad years swiftly passed, I saw that hori- 
zon circle grow larger and larger as her radiant 
spirit drank deeper of music and beauty and love 
and life. She lives to-night, and I know that her 
path turns not back. 

A TIME-MELLOWED VIOLIN 

Sunday Evening, May S, 
It was on an evening like this just a year ago 
that I first caught a glimpse of the meaning of 
music; a meaning which now I think I more fully 
understand. 



186 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

In the early morning I had been summoned to 
the home of Mrs. Minzie, who Hves in the eastern 
extremity of the Valley. Her only son, a lad of 
sixteen or eighteen years, had been thrown from 
the back of a young horse and the fall had injured 
his spine. It took but a hasty examination to 
reveal the fact that the boy would be a cripple 
for life. I knew then how a judge of the court 
must feel when in the discharge of his duty it 
falls to his lot to sentence a fellow mortal to a 
life term in prison or to the gallows, for Mrs. 
Minzie demanded to know the whole truth. This 
lad was not only the pride of her life, but her only 
hope and stay as she came on toward helpless 
and indigent days; but now, instead of being for 
her a staff upon which to lean, he had become a 
burden upon her shoulders bent already with 
loads which had been too heavy. 

These Elmwood hills shelter the valley's homes 
from the cold north winds that blow over a thou- 
sand miles of ice and snow, but they cannot pro- 
tect them from those winds that blow bleak across 
the plains of the heart. 

It was a glorious May-day, with the orchards in 
bloom and the foliage of the woods and the way- 
side trees reaching the fresh perfection of its form 
and color. The birds were happy in the full flush 
of their annual romances, for to them the joy of 
first love returns each year as the dandelions 
return to the meadows. The morning air was 



CLEARING SKIES 187 

warm and breathless, the smoke of a burning 
stump by the way ascending in a quavering per- 
pendicular column as does the smoke in Marson's 
picture, "Rest in Egypt," where the artist has 
suggested the desert's perfect calm. The clear 
azure of the sky was unflecked save by two hawks 
which swept round and round in slow and grace- 
ful circles as if they were designing rival plans for 
some mighty chandelier to be suspended in the 
blue dome of day. But all the beauty of the 
morning was dimmed to my eyes by the tragedy 
of the home that I had visited, and something of 
a chill shivered through all the May day's wel- 
come warmth. 

This problem of experience, this black strand 
in the fabric of life, has, from Job and the Greek 
Tragedies to Shakespeare and Browning, been 
the theme of the noblest of the works of litera- 
ture. The greatest and wisest spirit that this old 
world ever knew, in His Gethsemane, threw all 
the bitterness of human experience in one ago- 
nizing word, "Why.^" All the fair landscape of life 
and thought is darkened by the shadow of mys- 
tery even as that fair morning in May, a year ago, 
was darkened for me by the tragedies of those 
two valley homes. 

How hard to formulate a theory large enough 
to harmonize all the warring discordant facts of 
\iie? Like the put- together puzzles of childhood 
which we could not solve, we find it impossible to 



188 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

formulate a plan into which the pain and tragedy 
and mystery of life fit as parts of a perfect whole. 
The noblest philosophy can hardly make rational 
this jungle of caprice and contradiction that we 
know in human experience, and the sublimest 
religious faith rises above it not wholly com- 
placent or serene. 

I was still troubled and depressed when at twi- 
light I slowly walked through the meadows on 
the river path with no conscious objective point. 
But coming to the stile at the foot of the Mel- 
drum orchard, I heard the mellow strains of Vera's 
violin. I followed the path beneath the over- 
hanging bloom where the bees were still humming 
until I came to the place beneath the trees which 
she had but recently left, for her bird volume and 
notebook and field glasses lay upon the grass. 
I sat down in the rustic seat which was concealed 
by the shadows. Vera was playing in the music 
room, the windows of which reaching to the floor, 
were thrown open, and she stood framed in its 
rose-covered casement as Era Angelico framed his 
angel figures. Her face was upturned in the 
moonlight which was now beginning to flood the 
scene, and wholly unconscious of an audience and 
unhampered by notes, with perfect freedom and 
abandon, she threw herself into her playing. Un- 
noticed, I sat in the shadows and listened. 

First it was the rising and falling measures of 
Schumann's "Traumerei," then without stopping 



CLEARING SKIES 189 

she glided into the longings and sweet sadness of 
Wagner's "Song to the Evening Star," from 
Tannhauser; then slowly she passed, with bolder, 
steadier stroke, into the stately movements of her 
favorite Beethoven, where strength and tender- 
ness and joy and mystery mingle and harmonize 
in the incomparable beauty of that master's crea- 
tions. As her slender fingers swept up the strings 
in long, sweet-swelling tones, only in the deeper 
strains to sink away again into a diminishing 
melody, I realized how Beethoven in his art, as 
Plato and Phidias and Angelo and Shakespeare in 
theirs, had spoken, not simply to a class or to a 
generation, but had spoken the universal language 
of the soul. 

I had never heard her play better than she 
played that night; the violin became a yielding 
medium through which at last the highest and 
the deepest of her heart found a voice. Her 
cheek was pressed so closely to the trembling in- 
strument that it caught the untranslatable whis- 
perings of her spirit, and the subtilest hopes and 
dreams of an aspiring life were given in sound a 
habitation and a place. 

Saul, the Hebrew king, in the dark hour when 
all the white-winged ships of his hopes were 
wrecked on the rocks of error, and all his life plans 
lay broken behind, found some healing for his 
wounded heart, some light for his clouded mind, 
in the sweet music of the harp of the shepherd 



190 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

lad. While I listened a peace came upon me and 
a sense of the wholeness of life dawned. The dis- 
content of my spirit was hushed, even as the 
incoming tide of the ocean, creeping up bays and 
inlets, hushes with its flood the complaining voice 
of shallow river and stream. The effect was not 
merely negative in that I was lulled to for- 
get the cripple boy, nor that a multitude of un- 
answered questions no longer lifted clamorous 
voice for reply; but in some vague way I was led 
to feel, for the time being, the fulfillment of life. 

In the year that has passed since beneath the 
blossoms of the orchard I listened to the dreaming 
violin, something which then I did not see has 
come to me of the subtile and priceless message of 
art to the soul. 

Across the chasm of time from the accidental 
and the temporal to the shores of the permanent 
and the eternal. Vera, that night, flung the airy 
bridge of melody. In thought I passed from the 
sordid real to the ideal on the mystic passageway 
which the music of her spirit builded. 

In the bitter days of Polish oppression Chopin 
wrought out his sweetest songs, erecting in sound 
an empire of life beyond the reach of the cruelty 
of a tyrant's scepter; the bondsmen of the South 
in the darkest hours of slavery gathered at times 
at the close of a bitter day and in swinging, rollick- 
ing song created a kingdom of melody where 
neither the voice of the taskmaster nor the sound 



CLEARING SKIES 191 

of the driver's whip was heard. Vera with her 
violin had taken sounds from which had been 
extracted every suggestion of the sigh or cry of 
earth's pain or mystery, and out of this plastic 
quarry she had builded for the sense a city for 
the spirit, through whose portals there entered 
nothing that defileth, or that worketh abomina- 
tion, or that maketh a lie. It was a wondrous 
kingdom of melody where there was no pain- 
pinched face, no eyes dimmed with tears, and 
across whose sunlit places no shadows of mystery 
fell. 

Art at its best is prophetic. It is the shadow 
of the unseen where the veil has grown thin. And 
music is a call to the spirit, saying, "Arise, get 
thee hence; this is not thy home." 

ALL'S WELL WITH THE WORLD 

Sunday Evening, May 10. 

The question of the immortality of a human 
spirit is, after all, inseparably bound up with the 
question as to whether benevolence is the great 
law of life, and whether love is deep at the heart 
of things. If Love is on Heaven's throne then "all's 
well with the world." 

But in the face of the facts of life and of experi- 
ence are we privileged to believe that Love is 
supreme in the universe? Is there anything sad- 
der in history than the cry of Carlyle to his dead 
mother: "Your boy, Tom, long out of his school 



192 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

days, now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and 
broken in this pilgrimage of his life. From your 
grave in Ecclefechan Kirkyard yonder you bid 
him trust in God, and that he will try, if he can 
understand and do, for the conquest of the world 
and of death does verily lie in that, if one can but 
understand and do it." But that which was so 
hard for Carlyle to do is not easy for any of us. 
The tragedy and the mystery of life are deep and 
dark and that tragedy and mystery weigh the 
heaviest on the finest spirits and the noblest hearts. 

In imagination I look back across the ages of 
geology and how loveless in the far distance they 
seem. I see the wild forests dank and dark, the 
gigantic trees, the broad heavy leaves of which 
shut out the light save where here and there a ray 
of sunshine, sifting through the trembling foliage, 
serves but to emphasize the gloom that broods 
over jungle and lagoon. No mellow note of thrush 
or oriole is heard; the silence is unbroken save by 
the splashing of some monster in the mud or some 
wild bellowings, the last echo of which long ago 
died out of the air. There is the fierce combat, 
the groans of the dying, the pools red with blood, 
the victor gorging himself on the flesh of the con- 
quered. "Each slays a slayer and in turn is slain." 
"Life, red in tooth and claw, with ravine shrieks 
against the creed" of love. 

How dark a picture, too, does the long story of 
human history make! How cruel was Egyptian 



CX.EARING SKIES 193 

tyranny that demanded bricks without straw! 
How lurid is the page ht up with torch of burning 
Christians, and how red the chapter that tells of 
Rome's decline and fall ! How horrible the details 
of the French Revolution when in the mad-fool 
fury of the Seine an era closed in smoke and blood ! 
How rough and thorn-begirt is that path that 
runs through the yesterdays over which the bleed- 
ing feet of generations have traveled! 

The present has its nightmares that haunt even 
our waking hours; ghosts that walk our thoughts 
at midday and will not down even in the sunshine. 
In the most beautiful of our cities, I see bent and 
haggard thousands in the sweatshops, toiling in 
the night to earn the price which they must pay 
for an existence that is unworthy the name of life. 
I see great armies of little children in factory and 
mine who never knew what childhood meant, and 
whose white pinched faces is a plea to high 
Heaven, but to which the skies send back no 
answer. How much there is in the social life all 
around us to embitter the most buoyant heart and 
to eclipse the faith even of the strongest! 

Something of the soul of Saint Gaudens is reflected 
in the sad face of the noble bronze of Lincoln that 
he shaped, just as something of the soul of Raphael 
looks out at us from the tender lines and tints of 
the Sistine Madonna. If it is Love that has shaped 
and is still shaping life, some marks of love will 
be upon it. If the weaver of life's mottled fabric 



194 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

is Love some golden strands from his glowing 
heart will get among the threads that reel off from 
the great loom's ever-whirling spindles. 

Science has pointed out that in the ranges of 
animal life and even on the lower levels of uncon- 
scious life, love is nature's primal law. The fad- 
ing of the fresh beauty of the flowers in mid- 
summer is a sweet, mute foreshadowing of the 
fading cheek of sacrificing womanhood. The 
beauty of the flower and the beauty of woman- 
hood are alike laid down for the sake of new lives 
that are maturing at their hearts. A redeeming 
note is caught in the growl of the tiger and the 
roar of the lion when we remember that the 
bloody battles of mountain and wilderness are 
fought, not for self, but for the protection of the 
den and to gain food for the helpless young. 

We have seen a wayside pool in summer whose 
surface rippled before the wind; in its depths the 
blue vault of the sky was reflected, but the rip- 
pling surface shivered and shattered the reflection 
into a thousand fragments. It is an imperfect 
image that we catch in life's lower ranges, but 
some of the lineaments of love are reflected there. 

When we come up to the level of human life 
the finger prints of the power that shapes and 
controls are more distinct. Humanity is not a 
finished product. It is an unfinished fabric still 
on the loom, but the flying shuttle of the years is 
slowly but surely weaving into the growing tap- 



CLEARING SKIES 195 

estry the eternal patterns. It is but a picture, 
sketched in roughest outKne, but the great artist 
with infinite patience steadily is touching in a 
thousand finer and more tender details. One can 
hardly read correctly the story of the past without 
realizing that the Great Master of life is molding, 
progressively, the world into lines of beauty and 
love. The tide of the years flows on, empires rise 
and fall, the captains and the kings depart, but 
through the ages one increasing purpose runs. 
The plot in the dramatic tendency of the centuries 
moves inevitably toward the culmination, which 
is the revelation and the triumph of love. 

One must judge a purpose by the ultimate goal 
it has in view and not by the ways which it fol- 
lows to reach it. In upper New York they are 
building a great cathedral, but who would at- 
tempt to understand either the design or the 
genius of the architect by looking over the heaps 
of uncut stone, the unpolished marble, the un- 
finished columns that are strewn over Cathedral 
Heights. But rising out of the debris and con- 
fusion is here a graceful buttress, and there a 
noble arch, and yonder in pleasing lines of beauty 
and proportion a half -finished bay; in imagination 
one sees the great stone layers rise tier on tier, 
fulfilling the artist's vision, until, tower and pin- 
nacles finished, the building crowns the hill a 
dream in stone. And we read the genius of the 
architect, not in the stone piles and brick and 



196 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

mortar heaps that are but temporary means for 
the realization of his plans, but in the finished 
structure. 

Above the refuse of the ages, above the passions 
and foolishness and madness of men, above the 
heartache and the heartbreak of the centuries, I 
see rising, stone by stone, the white walls of the 
Temple of Human Brotherhood, The Temple of 
Love, whose maker and whose builder is God. 
There are problems in human life too difficult to 
solve; there are mysteries so profound that no 
star trembles in their night of darkness, but above 
all the mystery and all the problems I see the 
white walls rising. The dream of the Architect 
is taking form in lines of love before us. There 
is a Power not ourselves that makes for right- 
eousness; there is "a far off divine event toward 
which the whole creation moves"; and the power 
and the goal is love. 

When I think of the millions who have passed 
into the unbroken silence so suggestive of oblivion, 
or when I stand beneath a clear sky at night, and 
the vastness of the universe scares my spirit, then 
comes, as a ray of sunshine in winter, the reas- 
suring thought that, after all, the deepest thing 
in nature and in life is love; and "love can never 
lose its own." 

That thought burned like a sun in Vera's sky 
and with confident, radiant hope she walked an 
illumined path into the mystery. When my 



CLEARING SKIES 191 

time comes to travel the common road over which 
the uncounted milHons have passed, I trust that 
I shall meet the darkness at least without fear. 

TUNELESS STRINGS 

Sunday Evening, May 17. 

This afternoon at the Meldrum home I opened 
the box in which Vera kept her violin. For nearly 
a year it has remained undisturbed in the velvet- 
lined case where last she placed it. Two of the 
strings were broken and the other two were slack- 
ened and tuneless. It was no longer capable of 
producing the melody of the old days. And yet 
the masterpieces of Wagner and Verdi and Bee- 
thoven with which it had so often throbbed and 
exulted as she held it to her cheek and her slender 
fingers swiftly and lightly glided over the trem- 
bling strings, have not perished. The great com- 
positions still live, but this particular violin no 
longer is the medium through which they find 
noble expression. 

Science has not only revealed but has empha- 
sized the intimate relationship existing between 
brain and mind. Under present conditions men- 
tal life seems wholly dependent upon brain func- 
tion. Distinct areas of the brain seem so closely 
associated with particular mental activities that 
in cases of brain disease or brain injury the seat 
of trouble is accurately located by a careful study 
of the mental symptoms. When the blood grows 



198 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

hot, as in cases of fever, and it circulates through 
the dehcate cerebral vessels, the mental life be- 
comes abnormal and irrational; when the blood 
is impoverished and the brain is not nourished, 
there is a corresponding impoverishment of the 
intellectual life. When in death, therefore, the 
brain ceases longer to throb and becomes cold, 
inert matter, the obvious and inevitable, though 
superficial conclusion is that this marks the mind's 
final extinction. The candle is snuffed out and 
the illumination ceases; the harp strings snap and 
the music is ended. 

The Hebrews believed in Sheol and the Greeks 
in Hades; these terms stood for the idea of a vague 
and shadowy existence of the spirit beyond the 
grave. This belief was not a positive achieve- 
ment of the ancient mind; it was but a negative 
result following mental inability to grasp so ab- 
stract an idea as is implied in the ceasing of life. 
It was the outcome of their inability to picture 
in their imaginations the extinction of spirit. We 
have become so familiar with the intimate rela- 
tion existing between body and mind that many 
have found it difficult to grasp the idea of dis- 
embodied consciousness. It was mental impo- 
tency on the part of the ancients that led them 
to believe in the spirit's immortality; it is mental 
impotency on the part of the present that leads 
some to deny it. 

The thought of a disembodied consciousness 



CLEARING SKIES 199 

may present a difficulty to the imagination, but 
this, in itself, furnishes no reason for doubting or 
rejecting it as a fact. One of the demonstrated 
facts of science is that the power of attraction 
exerted by the sun on the earth is equivalent to 
the strain which would be sustained by a pillar 
of Bessemer steel with a diameter equal to the 
diameter of the earth and reaching from our 
planet to the sun. Though in every square inch 
of air ab'out us there is this tremendous tension 
we are wholly unconscious of it. The butterfly 
flits through it unimpeded, and a breeze so gentle 
as not to cause a ripple of the leaves of the birch 
passes by unobstructed. This is but one of thou- 
sands of similar statements made by modern 
science before which the imagination stands dumb 
and impotent, and yet this inability to picture in 
the imagination all of the conditions which a 
statement may imply is no proof that the state- 
ment itself is not true. 

Her violin is mute and tuneless, but the great 
music which once found expression through it 
still lives. And that fair face and form, fit temple 
of the beautiful spirit that for a time dwelt in it, 
I know is sinking back again to the earthly ele- 
ments out of which it came. But I doubt not that 
that spirit has found another and a nobler medium 
through which its love and aspiration finds a freer 
and more beautiful expression. 



200 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

THE SEQUEL OF THE YEARS 

Memorial Day, May 30. 

Another Memorial Day has rolled around. 
Its observance in our valley community is more 
general in character than the original idea of the 
day suggested. We lay flowers not only upon the 
graves of those who died in battle, but upon the 
graves of all those whom we have loved and lost. 
To-day, I made a wreath of the fairest and bright- 
est blossoms I could find and placed it upon Vera^s 
grave; others had been there before me, for the 
spot was covered with flowers. 

As I strolled through the cemetery I came upon 
the grave of Homer Judson, who but a few weeks 
ago, unlamented, passed away. A great granite 
monument, as expensive as it is inartistic, with 
outstanding letters that thrust on one's attention 
an unloved name, marks his resting place; but 
there was not a bouquet nor a blossom there. 
Just across the grassy isle lie the graves of our 
village heroes, the two boys who fell at Gettys- 
burg, and their mounds were piled high with a 
bewildering maze of many blossoms. 

But if there is no life beyond death, was not 
Homer Judson, who lived only for himself, wiser 
than the two lads who so recklessly threw their 
young lives away.^ Mr. Judson respected the 
moral law only as far as it served his purposes. 
He was prudent in his immoralities. He never 



CLEARING SKIES 201 

transgressed any law so far as to lay himself liable 
to its penalties. He was never so indiscreet in his 
indulgences as to wreck his own life, but there 
were fair young lives, I am told, which years ago 
he blackened and blasted. He accumulated a 
fortune largely by stealing the hard-earned fruits 
of others' toil, but his stealing was always done 
within the bounds of the law. He never sacri- 
ficed himself or his comfort in any cause, never 
spent a dollar for the uplift of the community, 
and never shortened, even by an hour, his life 
through worry or anxiety over another's pain or 
loss. He enjoyed good health up to the end and 
died at the age of eighty-six. If the dead live not 
again, and the mound in the cemetery is a period, 
marking a full stop after the brief sentence of life, 
did not Judson drive in this, as in all other of his 
transactions, the best possible bargain with the 
flying years.f^ 

We praise the sacrifice of these boys who fell 
on the edge of the wheat-field on the second day 
at Gettysburg, but if they sleep an eternal sleep, 
what was the profit of that sacrifice to them.^ We 
heap their graves with flowers, but what reward is 
that to eyes that have turned to ashes? We sing 
their praises, but what is that to ears that long 
ago crumbled back to dust? Virtue is its own 
reward, we are told, but they did not live to feel 
the thrill of self -approval; they died in the hour 
of their heroic deeds. If death ends all, it is not 



202 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

easy to see how they acted wisely in throwing 
away the only life they would ever have. "What," 
says Paul, "is the profit to me that I fought the 
beasts at Ephesus if the dead rise not?" 

Yet, when to-day the people of this valley 
heaped high with flowers the graves of the two 
boys who laid down their lives in an unselfish 
service of others, they gave expression to the 
strongest and the deepest conviction of the human 
heart. We place a supreme value on moral char- 
acter. There is not in our little cemetery, perhaps 
there is not in any cemetery, an epitaph written 
by living hands above the places where a loved 
one sleeps which mentions the wealth that he 
possessed, or the social position that he occupied, or 
the elegance of the home he lived in. A man, when 
living, may be known as the richest man in the 
world; his friends will not mention this on his 
tomb when he is dead. We dare not speak of our 
departed save as we speak of them in ethical terms. 
In our true hours, we all know that a man is not 
profited even if he gain the whole world, if in the 
gaining of it he has bartered off the inner integ- 
rity of his own spirit. 

This supreme value which we place on moral 
character is, in itself, a prediction of a future life. 
"What a man soweth that shall he also reap"; 
but the years of a man's earthly life do not always 
furnish a period long enough to mature the har- 
vest. These boys sowed, but they died before 



CLEARING SKIES WS 

the fields whitened to their eyes. The fruit for 
them must ripen under other skies. The supreme 
value that we place on the sacrifice and martyr- 
dom of a Lincoln, of a Huss, of a Savonarola, of 
a Paul, of a Christ, speaks of a moral drama, but 
the sequel of the drama our human years do not 
furnish. Life is a wild-eyed madness if the cur- 
tain is not to be rung up on another scene. 

A SHOCK OF CORN IN ITS SEASON 

The photographer has attained some success in 
the enlarging of his pictures, nature triumphs in 
reducing hers. A sky where the fleecy clouds of 
June are piled high as if invisible giants had 
heaped many a vaporous Ossa on Pelion to make 
a stairway to heaven, is reproduced in the small- 
est wayside pool with no detail of line or color 
missing. If one could thus in some magic way 
picture in a paragraph all the details of a busy 
life reaching over a period of a quarter of a cen- 
tury or more, some idea could be conveyed of Dr. 
Colvin's career at Elmwood. We can, however, 
touch it but in the briefest outline. 

He lived a life of deep and practical interests 
and entered readily into its wholesome pleasures. 
On the night of his loss as he walked down the 
lane where he and she had so often walked to- 
gether, and along which then the shadows were 
lengthening, he felt that another shadow had 
been cast so far down his path, as he saw it 



204 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

stretch away lonely in the future, that he should 
never be able to walk beyond it. In this he was 
not wholly wrong. Life to him after that night 
was never quite what it had been before. But 
time is a great physician, and when the sharp bit- 
terness of his winter of sorrow was over spring 
touched again the leafless branches of his life to 
blossom. The mountain of his grief was rough 
and rugged when he crossed it, but in the dis- 
tance its outline was softened and it lay along the 
horizon of his thought suggestive of sentiments 
more akin to pleasure than to pain. 

For thirty years and over he had answered the 
calls that came from the valley's homes, and the 
smile on his face and the cheer of his heart had 
wrought more cures than had the drugs in the 
case he carried. They trusted to his skill in the 
birth hours, and they leaned on him when the 
great shadow darkly hovered. His unfailing 
courage and grim determination in the crucial 
hour of many an uncertain fight had awakened in 
the patient a responsive purpose that had been the 
deciding factor of the conflict. And when neither 
medicine nor courage could hold at bay the grim 
messenger, and hope took its flight, he was the one 
selected, because he was strong and tender, to break 
the news to anxious hearts. Thus year by year the 
people of Elmwood found a larger place in his life 
and he found a larger place in their hearts. 

When the choir of young men and women on 



CLEARING SKIES W5 

Sunday morning sang some old and familiar hymn, 
his thoughts drifted away and he saw again an- 
other singer and heard again another voice. In 
those moments there was a strange mingling of 
memory and of hope and he was not sure whether 
he was hearing echoes from out the past, or 
whether, like the village blacksmith in Long- 
fellow's poem, he was listening to her voice sing- 
ing in Paradise. In those moments his eyes were 
lit up with light borrowed from the past and from 
the future, from the perished and from the eter- 
nal years. 

The early part of the winter of his sixtieth 
year was a severe one; there had been much sick- 
ness, and he had been compelled to take long rides, 
facing storms of sleet and snow. One midnight, 
late in December, when the temperature was be- 
low zero, he was called to one of the remotest 
homes in the valley. For hours on horseback he 
struggled through the darkness and snow-filled 
roads, not reaching his destination until nearly 
daybreak. When he returned home late that after- 
noon he found an urgent call from a family far 
up the valley in the opposite direction from 
where he had been. The storm had increased 
and the piercing wind was piling up the new fallen 
snow until the fences by the roadways were hidden 
from sight. His friends urged him not to under- 
take the trip, but they knew how useless was their 
advice when they saw on his face that look of 



206 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

determination which the boys in the old foot- 
ball days hailed as a presage of victory. He 
made the trip and his timely arrival saved a life, 
as it had so many times before, but this time a 
life was saved at the price of his own. 

Through the remaining months of winter he 
was confined to the house, but his wish that he 
might live to see once more the return of the 
birds and the blossoms of spring was gratified. 
One warm day late in April he walked down the 
old path along the edge of the meadows to the 
bridge across the river, and for an hour or 
more he sat in the sunshine on the bank 
and rested. His thoughts while there were 
perhaps not of things around him, and what he 
saw mirrored in the unruffled surface of the little 
river were not the reflected images of the flowers 
and trees along the banks. When he returned to 
the house he wrote in his journal for the last time. 

THE TURN OF THE TIDE 

The Journal's Last Entry. 
It was a twilight hour like this, and the fields 
were as green and the little river was as beautiful 
with sunset tints as they are to-night, when Vera 
breathed out her life with the poet's words, "My 
Pilot face to face." Her frail boat put out on 
what then seemed to me a black and angry ocean 
over which arched a starless night, and into the 
darkness no earth-lamp cast a single illuminating 



CLEARING SKIES 207 

ray. The great sea is still uncharted, and mystery 
hangs low over its shoreless waters, yet the mist 
banks that enshroud it are touched with a faint, 
pink glow where a dawn burns far beyond them. 
I cannot picture to myself the great future in 
conventional colors; I cannot think of its con- 
ditions in the terms of conventional description. 
I do not and could not entertain, with any thrill 
of pleasure, the thought of walking for seons the 
streets of a city, even though the streets were paved 
with gold and the city had walls of jasper and gates 
of pearl. I should grow weary of endless worship 
however grand the music and however beautiful 
the temple. I should not want to idly loiter for 
an eternity on a beach, even of a crystal sea. 

What can be accurately defined does not chal- 
lenge the imagination nor meet even half way the 
great hungers of the heart. Uplift and inspira- 
tion come from truths whose ultimate borders 
and significance reach beyond our mental hori- 
zons. There is more to stir the heart in the Alps 
looming up in confused masses of inaccessible 
cloud-wrapped and snow-crowned heights that 
shoulder up the sky, than there is in a hill to the 
top of which we can climb and whose dimensions 
the surveyor's chain can exactly determine. 

The vision of the future which is a challenge to 
the best that is in me is not one that I see clearly, 
but one, rather, that I see as through a glass 
darkly. I see it as a mother sees the future 



208 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

of her babe as she bends above its cradle in 
her dreaming hours, or as the ambitious youth 
sees in the distance his success. The mother sees 
not clearly the future of her babe, nor does she 
desire to; she knows only that before his power 
and goodness the world shall bow; the youth 
does not attempt to picture his success in terms 
of wealth or place or power, but he hears the 
bells ringing far down the years and hears the 
shouts of acclaim that mark his triumph. I do 
not borrow tints from the bleached and faded 
colors of earth, or thrills from our sated experi- 
ence, or love from the tarnished years, and out 
of these construct my vision; I do not attempt to 
define in detail all that hope largely, but vaguely, 
promises. 

There are truths of the heart which no brain- 
spun web of phrases can enmesh; there are swift, 
swallow-winged suggestions that elude the snare 
of words. A future that is large enough to meet 
all of the heart's deep hungers is too large to be 
encompassed by the symbols of human speech. 
I shall see again a fair and beautiful face, I shall 
hear again the rippling laughter of a happy heart, 
"and with God be the rest." 

MORNING BREAKS 

The walk and effort of the afternoon com- 
pletely exhausted him, and that night he slept 
but little. When the dim light of coming day 



CLEARING SKIES 209 

began to show, he asked the nurse to bolster him 
up in the bed that he might see the morning 
break. The eastern sky, toward which his win- 
dows opened, was touched with faintest pink 
which changed to crimson as he watched, then 
to fiery gold. Across the strata clouds which lay 
in narrow irregular layers along the horizon shot 
up great radiating shafts of light like the spokes 
of a mighty wheel, the hub of which was still 
below the horizon. It was, in the language of the 
Orient, the wings of the morning as day came 
sweeping on over eastern seas. Each separate 
shaft was a broken ray, but all pointed below the 
sky line to an unrisen sun. He watched for some 
time in silence the brightening day and the flash- 
ing of the great radiating lines of light; then he 
said to the nurse: "During my life as a doctor 
the subject of a spirit's future has often been 
pressed upon me. All the lines of reason that I 
can follow, and all the promises that hope gives 
rise to, and all the dreams in which love indulges, 
point, as do those shafts of light, to one great 
fact as their source and explanation. The sun 
will reveal itself and day will break; so will im- 
mortality." 

The morning grew apace; the sunshine touched 
the elms on the highest hill along the river and 
it was as a signal fire which was quickly answered 
by a kindled fire on all the hills far up the valley. 
A ray of light touched the gilded ball on the 



no THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

church's spire which flashed back an answering 
kiss of greeting. The sunshine crept down the 
ivied tower until it flooded the Valley and stained 
the long, still river stretches with mingled gold 
and fire. One arrowlike ray pierced the tender 
foliage of the newly leaved maples and, passing 
through the open windows, lit up suddenly a face 
in an oaken frame which seemed to smile as if in 
a welcome greeting. 

Day had come, but Dr. Colvin did not see it 
break on the Elmwood hills, for his eyes were 
closed. He had fallen into a sleep from which no 
midnight call would again awaken him. 

REKINDLED TORCHES 

The sun runs by day its great course above the 
peaceful valley, and the splendid procession of the 
stars sweeps past by night. The shadow on the 
weather-stained dial in the Meldrum lawn shortens 
and lengthens through the year, as of old, as the 
seasons run their course from spring to spring 
again. The robin and the bluebird return in 
March to sing and build in the familiar places, 
and in autumn the maples on the hills turn to 
crimson and the squirrel chirks and chatters amid 
the oak's purple foliage. 

The stream of human life flows through the 
Valley as the water of the little river flows between 
its winding shores. 

The children as of old launch their mimic 



CLEARING SKIES 211 

navies of white-sailed craft on the river's smooth 
waters, and youth and maiden walk woodland 
paths, and love creates over them and about 
them a new heaven and a new earth. Happy 
mothers, too, lean over cooing cradles, and strong 
men, sobered by the responsibilities of life, walk 
with heavier step and their shoulders slowly stoop 
beneath the burden of the years. 

Sad processions still wend their way to the little 
cemetery, and the ever-increasing number of 
mounds there reveals that the Valley's winding 
paths, whether traveled by youth or age, all end 
at last in this quiet spot beneath the maples. 
And heavy-hearted ones, reluctantly leaving some 
newly made mound over which the grass has not 
yet grown green, pause on the old bridge which 
crosses the Oatka just beyond the cemetery gate, 
and there find comfort in the poet's hope that 
life's broken circles will, in the dark unknown, be 
made perfect, even as the bridge's arch of stone is 
rounded in the stream. 

Many while strolling on quiet Sunday after- 
noons in the cool shade of the little cemetery 
pause in reverent silence where two graves lie, 
not far apart, both now even with the sward. 
On one stone, lichen-covered, is "Vera"; on the 
other, more recently set up, is "Henry Colvin." 

In the storm and stress of life, when so often 
the lamps burn low, here the people of this quiet 
valley relight the torch of the immortal hope. 



212 THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 

LIFE IS THE LIGHT 

The journal of Dr. Colvin was found after his 
death among his books. It contained his obser- 
vations upon many themes relating to life, and 
conspicuous among these were his thoughts upon 
the subject of immortality. Dr. Colvin's depth 
and tenderness, as well as strength of character, 
together with his capacity for great living, give 
to his words an especial significance. 

The question of immortality is a question of 
life, and he is best qualified to speak upon that 
subject whose experience in living has been the 
deepest and the truest. Our belief or our unbelief 
in the future existence of the spirit will grow out 
of our estimate of the value and significance of 
the spirit's present existence. 

The mole, burrowing his blind way through the 
muck, does not know much about the flowers 
that are blooming above him or about the stars 
shining far overhead. The man who lives on the 
animal level, whose thoughts are self -centered, 
whose passions are his master and whose appe- 
tites are his god, may know something about 
existence, he can know but little about life. It 
often happens that a man who shares such an 
experience expresses his doubt, or his unbelief in 
the reality of the spirit's future; his opinion is 
not a matter of prime importance, for in this 
sphere he is not qualified to speak with authority. 



•'*-/^;",.'-'. .'.i? 




THE COMPLETED CIRCLE 



CLEARING SKIES 213 

He alone knows life who has sounded its deeps, 
who has climbed to its sun-bathed heights, who 
has heard the call of great duties, who has felt 
the uplift of great devotions, whose soul has 
thrilled with lofty and unselfish purposes, whose 
eyes have caught the beckoning gleam of infinite 
ideals, whose heart has burned with a great and 
noble love. He alone knows life who has known 
the tragedy of hope's defeat and the night of 
love's eclipse, and in the depths has heard the 
cry of the spirit's mighty need. 

The great seers, from Plato to Fiske, who saw 
the infinite imaged in the human spirit as they 
saw the blue sky-dome imaged in the wayside 
pool, the great poets, from Homer to Browning, 
whose hearts, like inlets to the sea, felt the throb 
and sweep of the ocean of human love and hope, 
have, from their privileged heights, called bravely 
down to those who walked more lowly ways, 
assuring them that beyond the earth-mist they 
saw the dawn-tints of an eternal day. 

It is not without significance that the choice 
spirits of all the ages, the men of deep and rich 
experience, have voiced the one conviction, that 

Life is ever Lord of death. 

And love can never lose her own. 

The End 



